British Council − UK at the Venice Biennale

The common things
that lie on table tops
live again as Painters props.

['Towards Chardin', ll.16-18.]

William Scott wrote this to accompany a 1975 book of his drawings, but it does as good a job of summing up the still-lifes that dominated his 1958 Venice show – 'a public climax', in Norbert Lynton's enormous account of his life.

For someone showing work in the British Pavilion, where both Turners and Constables had hung in the last ten years, it might be natural to expect links with the English Landscape tradition. Instead, the poem's title refers to Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, an eighteenth-century French painter, because, as Alan Bowness points out, Scott's mixed Scottish and Irish upbringing meant 'England was as foreign a country as France; Constable was a foreign painter.' A formative memory was seeing the exhibition A Thousand Years of Still Life Painting in Paris, where, in 1946, he was

really overwhelmed by the fact that the subject had hardly changed for a thousand years, and yet each generation in turn expressed its own period and feelings within this terribly limited narrow range of the still life.

Chardin is a major figure in that history; his career in still life began with a shop sign for a surgeon, and ended up bringing the form official, academic, painterly prestige. Along the way, he married a rich widow in 1744, and upped the class of food and utensils in his paintings accordingly. Scott, who stressed 'I was brought up in a grey world, an austere world: the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture', was keen to make the opposite social point about himself. Even at the height of his success - perhaps best illustrated by a 1968 photograph of him at an expensive-looking Venetian lunch, surrounded by critics and fellow artists - his paintings contain 'a frying pan, a few eggs, a toasting fork, objects without much glamour'. 'I wanted my pictures to have a painting not literary success', he explained, and, these objects

been painted so many times before – they contain no story – [so] any virtues that I hope they contain are the virtues of painting, construction, space, colour – in fact to be looked at through the language of abstract art.

The Frying Pan (1946) marks a break with the watercolour landscapes he'd been producing, for reasons of portability and artistic fashion, during his war service in the Royal Engineers. The painting had already toured Europe on the British Council's 1947-8 'Modern British Paintings' show, and, as the earliest work in his Biennale display, pointed the way to the clutch of recent still lifes beside it. Many of them dated from 1957: 'the year before William had his exhibition at the Biennale', his wife, Mary remembered, 'we had gone to Venice to see what William should paint and to see the British Pavilion.'

It was a mixture of paintings best explained by Scott himself:

I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.

Amongst the kitchen utensils, there were two naked women, Reclining Nude (Red) (1957) and Nude – Red Background (1957). Scott seems to have thought of all his figurative subjects in similar terms, and spoke of 'animating' still-life 'in the sense that one could animate a [human] figure'. The end result is often an odd sexual charge, and Norbert Lynton warned 'anyone sensing a religious quality in the partial symmetry' in, for example, Frying Pan, Bottle and Sardines (1950 – not shown at Venice), should be careful: 'part of it, the tall bottle and two eggs on the right are thought to suggest male genitalia.'

Figure and Still Life (1956) gently blends the two, with a fairly abstract head and arm peeking over the top-left corner of Scott's familiar laden table. A nude against an unfocused, perspectiveless background doesn't, at first, seem unusual, but the leaning elbow reminds us that the pans and the background table don't conform to traditional rules of perspective.

Making such ordinary objects 'live again' recalls what, elsewhere in the pavilion, Kenneth Armitage's sculpture was doing for groups of people doing ordinary things. But its roots are in Cornwall, in 1935-6, where Scott had gone to follow the example of the 'naïve' Cornish fisherman painter Alfred Wallis. Wallis worked perspective out in terms of emotion, rather than feet and inches: objects were sized according to how important he found them, rather than how far away they were. In landscapes, often from windows, Ben Nicholson and Christopher Wood had also found this an exciting way of re-imagining the world; Nicholson became a friend, and Wood became the eyes 'through which', Scott remembered, he 'saw Cornwall'.

To put Scott's still-lifes in some European context, Robert Melville compared him to Giorgio Morandi, a contemporary Italian painter who'd won the Venice Painting Prize in 1948. Though 'Morandi's groups leave an impression of deep silence', he reckoned, 'Scott's pots and pans call and answer across varying distances.'

This variety and liveliness comes from what Patrick Heron calls the 'rugged barn-door (or fishing-boat hull) quality' of his paint, pushed around canvases like Gouache – Abstract (1957) and Upright Abstract (1957), gently, and very like the way he described his drawings: 'exploring not explaining'. This was particularly noticeable in the 1958 British Pavilion, as Scott was co-exhibiting with S. W. Hayter, an engraver who used what Heron called a 'whiplash' line to create a whirling sense of motion and power.

In 1958, Scott was a central figure in European and American art, entertaining Mark Rothko and his family at the Scott cottage in Hallatrow, Somerset. On that family holiday, both fathers were planning murals: Rothko the Seagram series, originally designed to terrify wealthy diners at New York's Four Seasons restaurant, and Scott The Four Seasons, to soothe patients at Altnagelvin hospital in Derry. The pair had met in New York in 1953, at the height of Abstract Expressionism, and the beginning of the American's fame. But rather than sweeping Scott along as the first European artist on the scene, the experience, which he called 'a surprise and a shock', made him surer of his way.

My reaction to American painting was, I think, to make me realise that my origin was in Europe and I was resolved to take advantage of what I had learned from America and I returned to put some of my former ideas of still life and figure into a larger format.

[…]

With the example of Ben Nicholson, whom I much admired, there was no reason for me to be devoted entirely to abstraction, and I embarked on a process of re-discovery.

Until Alzheimer's made painting impossible in the mid '80s, he moved through experiments with an entirely blue palette, cartoonish still lifes of pears, and, after the Altnagelvin mural, more simplified forms. Throughout, his eye was on producing art with 'mystery, geometry, quality of touch, surprise and above all audacity.'

The Biennale was a 'public climax', but Scott had also represented Britain at the São Paulo Bienal in 1953 and 1961. Although he made CBE in 1966, and Royal Academician in 1984, by his death in 1989, obituarists were complaining of his neglect. In Scott's own words, he fell in 'the generation in between' fashions for figurative and abstract painting, and, in terms of art history, suffered for the arrival of Pop art in the 1960s.

Tom Overton, 2009.

Sources

Alan Bowness, William Scott: Paintings Drawings and Gouaches 1938-71 (London: Tate, 1972).

Alan Bowness, The Paintings of William Scott (1958) [British Pavilion Press Release, Held in British Council Visual Arts Library].

Mel Gooding, 'Scott, William George (1913–1989)', rev. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online edn, May 2006, accessed 27th January 2009.

Lou Klepac, ed., Alan Bowness & William Scott, William Scott: drawings, (NY: David Anderson, 1975).

Norbert Lynton, William Scott (London: Phaidon, 2004).

'Obituaries: William Scott, Abstract and still-life painter', The Times, 30th December 1989.

William Scott with Martin Attwood, Script for Recorded Illustrated Lecture [Held in British Council Visual Arts Library, Undated,].

Please visit the excellent website: http://williamscott.org