William Scott “Domestic Forms Late Paintings, 1976–86”
Fergus McCaffrey
This event has ended.
As a part of the centennial celebrations of the birth of William Scott (1913–1989), McCaffrey Fine Art presents Domestic Forms, an exhibition of late paintings created between 1976 and 1986. This is the gallery’s second William Scott exhibition and follows our acclaimed 2010 survey of paintings and drawings created between 1950 and 1986.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Scott was renowned. The art critic Hilton Kramer called him “the best painter of his generation in England.” James Johnson Sweeney of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum quipped that “at last Britain has a painter.” Yet, after achieving an international reputation more solid than Francis Bacon or Lucian Freud, Scott “disappeared from the radar,” as the Financial Times’s Jackie Wullschlager recently noted, asking, “Who has heard of him today? And why not?” (Financial Times, April 26, 2013).
Wullschlager’s questions were touched off by a highly praised series of museum exhibitions in the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland in the last nine months—at Tate St. Ives; Enniskillen Castle Museum; Jerwood Gallery, Hastings; The Hepworth Wakefield; and Victoria Art Gallery, Bath—that have brought renewed awareness and a reappraisal of Scott’s singular work. Andrew Lambirth of the Spectator wrote of Scott’s show at The Hepworth as “an exhibition to relish, which effortlessly reasserts William Scott as one of the pre-eminent painters of his era” (Spectator, June 1, 2013).
Domestic Forms features twenty-three still-life paintings, varying in scale from the monumental to the intimate. Motifs such as cups, saucers, fish, pears, mushrooms, pipes, and string beans, which had been the staple of Scott’s works from the early 1940s until the late 1950s, reappeared in about 1969 after a decade’s absence, though thoroughly reinvented and honed to an essence. Energized by an uncanny sense of compositional dynamics, Scott’s works are fresh and assured, exhibiting the simplicity and directness of a master painter’s late style.
Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913 and grew up in Northern Ireland. He received his art training in Belfast and at the Royal Academy School in London. Scott’s first exhibition in New York took place in 1954 at the Martha Jackson Gallery, where he would show until 1979, to great acclaim. Scott represented Britain at the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958, and the first major retrospective of his work occurred in 1960 at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. Further retrospectives took place at the Kunsthalle Bern, 1963; Tate Gallery, London, 1972; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, 1975; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, 1986; and posthumously at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1998; and Tate St. Ives, 2013. The Ulster Museum’s retrospective of Scott’s work opens in October 2013 and runs until February 2014.
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Schedule
from September 10, 2013 to October 26, 2013