. . . great natural gifts

Sooner or later we all quote the painter's own words, published in 1954:
I was brought up in a grey world, an austere world: the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture. The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best and the pictures which looked most like mine were painted on walls a thousand years ago.
He had grown up in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, the oldest boy in a family of eleven children. His father was a skilled house- and sign-painter and trained William up to be his assistant. William senior died suddenly, so that William junior at fourteen found himself the oldest male of the household. He carried on his father's business but a year later began art studies at Belfast College of Art. Then the Royal Academy Schools in London; a difficult, rebellious student, they called him, but they awarded him prizes. Life remained hard, and it was still an austere world he lived in with Mary, a fellow student who became his wife in 1937. From 1941 on they lived in a Somerset cottage where William worked his market-garden while also teaching part-time (and after 1946 full-time) at the Bath Academy of Art.
It was an austere time for all, with war and cultural isolation (and William in the army, 1942-46), and rationing continuing long after while weeds flourished in the bomb sites. One national reaction was to look towards a positive future: the 1951 Festival of Britain signalled that optimism, especially its South Bank industrial and cultural display in a variety of new buildings. The Arts Council's exhibition of large paintings, '60 Paintings for 1951', caused a public stir. There was a prize and there were official purchases. William's inclusion signalled his arrival on the art scene, but his painting neither won the prize nor got bought.
It was a Still Life. 'Symbols of the life I knew best' meant still lifes, with kitchen tables, bowls and frying pans, a chip basket and a toasting fork, sometimes fish and eggs, all rather sharply presented, none of them hinting at indulgence or even ease. 'Walls...' pointed to cave paintings and primordiality. This was his choice. He was passionate about the early Renaissance's clarity of form and colour, admired in Italy and in the National Gallery. He had worked in Pont-Aven, starting an art summer school there, in the world of Gauguin's followers, until the war put an end to that. He had painted flowers, landscapes and Mary, with colour and a subtle Post-Impressionist touch. Bonnard was one of his heroes. His austerity was an option, perhaps also his way of speaking of war and its aftermath. Others, especially on the Continent, were painting and sculpting images of blood and ruination and of decomposing humanity.
Scott handled austerity with growing aplomb. He was close to the St. Ives painters, Patrick Heron and Roger Hilton especially. In 1953 he visited Rothko, Pollock, De Kooning and others in New York, and in 1954 he began to exhibit there regularly. He was never an English painter, but these experiences taught him that his essential roots were European and Irish. He was naturally international. In 1953 he showed twelve paintings at the Sao Paulo Bienal. In 1958 he showed twenty paintings in the 1958 Venice Biennale, and they toured European cities during 1956-59.
At that time he might well have said: Concentrating on a few forms and colours in the name of austerity taught me art's prodigality. Even in my black and white paintings of the early 1950s I luxuriated in multiple whites and blacks and the sheer lavishness of paint over paint. Also ambiguities: objects could play at being figures, and figures could grow out of and into chairs, and paint itself could look fierce or beguiling according to how it was placed, especially when I adopt the rhetoric of impulsive action versus constructive building. Pots and pans, nudes, eggs and pears; rounded forms, but also sometimes thrusting ones when I paint the handles of things. Expansive still lifes can be like stage dramas or like an open landscape; a richly clustered still life, with sonorous blues or reds and oranges, confronting us like an opera chorus or a furry beast. Paint over paint, scratched layers giving glimpses of other colours below, releasing a sense of slow voluptuousness for all the simplicity of my tilling.
We can watch this developing duplicity in the Scott's shown here. The 1952 Still Life with Frying Pan announces itself as an ascetic composition; it is also an astonishingly rich assemblage of paint over paint, flat and not flat, geometrical but not quite, black and white but hinting at layers of red, orange and cream below. His Fish and Frying Basket, a few years later, rehearses his basic still life theme and brings the objects in it closer to us, but here too what we experience is richness, and complications of a perhaps ironic sort, as in the black handle that rises proudly on the right from an otherwise unseen pan. Cups and mugs suavely arrayed on a soft brown shape more promontory than table make up his 1958 painting, Table with Still Life, No.1. The painting he titled 2nd April 1961 is mostly blacks and white, rich in texture and what we call abstract. But it is not far from being a still life too, like his 1961 Blue, Brown and Black, done on paper with gouache, chalk and crayon.
The 1960s found him concentrating his means further, and disposing (more or less) flat forms on (more or less) flat fields, large and small. They could still end up as familiar things, mugs, bowls, jugs, and at times he would annotate them freely: see the scribbled grapes in Grapes and Bottle (1974) but note also the odd placing and form of the bottle. He was always drawing, and line was as marvellous to him as colour and texture. How mellifluous he could be is celebrated here in the large and glowing Linear White (1972), at once primitive and the highly sophisticated, minimal and luxuriant. With similar concentration he returned to the reclining nude in drawings and painting, using line and flat areas of colour to achieve a sort of classicism out of reductio (almost) ad absurdum. Figure and Still Life (1972) is an oil painting of this sort, minimalist too in its way but with fine colour, as well as the entertaining dialogue in which forms engage so readily if we let them.
William Scott had great natural gifts. He invested and re-invested them ceaselessly, alert to the world around him but most of all to what he found his media and his imagination could make happen together. He had a proper claim to austerity: he spoke less memorably about the pleasures he could deliver in art and of the cunning and sheer wit that proposed them to him.

Norbert Lynton is an art historian and critic who has spent many years teaching in art schools and universities and also writing, especially on modern art. He has also been responsible for many exhibitions (during the 1970s he was director of exhibitions at the Arts Council) in Britain and abroad.
His books include The Story of Modern Art and monographs on Ben Nicholson and Victor Pasmore. He is working on a book on William Scott.

Selected Bibliography

1913
Born Greenock, Scotland, son of an Irish father and Scottish mother
1924
Family returned to father's home town, Enniskillen, Northern Ireland
1928
Entered Belfast College of Art
1931
Moved to London, entered Royal Academy Schools, initially in Sculpture School
1933
Awarded silver medal for sculpture
1934-35
Transferred to Painting School
Awarded Landseer Scholarship in Painting
1935
Awarded Leverhulme Travelling Scholarship
1936
Worked for six months near Penzance, Cornwall
1937
Married Mary Lucas, painter and sculptor, a fellow student at the RA Schools
1937-38
Lived in Italy for six months, visiting Florence, Venice and Rome
1938
Moved to Pont-Aven, Brittany
Met Geoffrey Nelson, with whom the Scotts organized the Pont-Aven School of Painting
Elected Societaire du Salon d'Automne
Moved to St-Tropez and Cagnes-sur-Mer,
South of France
1939
Returned to Pont-Aven to teach and paint
Met Maurice Denis and Emile Bernard
On outbreak of war left France and returned to Britain. Settled in Dublin
1940
Birth of son Robert
Returned to London
1941
Moved to Hallatrow, Somerset, and taught part-time at the Bath Academy of Art
Birth of son James
1942
Volunteered for the Army, and served with the Royal Engineers for nearly four years
No painting, except for some watercolour landscapes
First one-man exhibition at the Leger Gallery, Bond Street
1946-56
Left Army and returned to Somerset
Appointed Senior Painting Master at the Bath Academy of Art, now at Corsham Court
1949
Elected member of the London Group
1951
One of the artists invited by the Arts Council to paint a large picture for the Festival of Britain
1952
Took a studio and apartment in Chelsea, London, but continued to live part of the year at Hallatrow, with summers often spent in Cornwall
1953
First visit to North America as guest instructor at the summer school of the University of Alberta's Banff School of Fine Arts. Returned to England via New York, where met Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, Brooks and other American painters
One of five painters selected by the
British Council to show recent work at the
II Sao Paulo Bienal
1954
First exhibition in New York, at the Martha Jackson Gallery (with Barbara Hepworth and Francis Bacon)
1958
Retrospective exhibition at the XXIX
Venice Biennale
1959
Awarded first prize in the British painting section at the second John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool
1961
Completed a mural for Altnagelvin Hospital in Londonderry, Northern Ireland; the work measures 9 x 45 feet
Exhibited at the VI Sao Paulo Bienal; awarded Sanbra (International Critics) Purchase Prize.
1963
Retrospective exhibition at the Kunsthalle, Berne, and at the Ulster Museum, Belfast (modified)
1965
Moved to Coleford, near Bath
1966
Created C.B.E.
1972
Retrospective at the Tate Gallery, London
1973
Visited Australia, Mexico and India as visiting lecturer for the British Council
1975
Honorary Doctor of Royal College of Art
1976
Honorary Doctor of Literature, Queen's University, Belfast
Visited Japan where exhibited at Kasahara Gallery, Osaka
1977
Honorary Doctor of Literature, Trinity College, Dublin
1984
Elected to the Royal Academy
1985
Featured in Channel 4 television film Every Picture Tells a Story
Awarded the Korn Ferry prize at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition
1986
Retrospective at the Ulster Museum, Belfast, and touring
Awarded first prize (with John Hoyland) at the Royal Academy
Summer Exhibition
1989
Died in December
Selected Exhibitions
1942/45
Leger Gallery, London
1948/51
Leicester Galleries, London
1953/54/56/61/63/65/67/69/71
Hanover Gallery, London
1953
II Bienal, Sao Paulo, Brazil
1954/56/59/62/73/75/79
Martha Jackson Gailery, New York
1958
XXIX Biennale, Venice
Musee d'art moderne, Paris (retrospective)
1959
Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne
Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
Kunsthaus, Zurich
Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam
Galleria d'Arte Galatea, Turin
Galleria Charles Lienhard, Zurich
1960
Kestner Gesellschaft, Hanover, and touring (retrospective)
1961
Esther Robles Gallery, Los Angeles
VI Bienal, Sao Paulo
1963
Galeria Schmela, Dusseldorf
Kunsthalle, Berne
Ulster Museum, Belfast
Galerie Anderson-Mayer, Paris
1964
Ford Foundation Exhibition
Haus am Waldsee, Berlin
1966/74
Gimpel & Hanover Gallery, Zurich
1969
Richard Demarco Gallery, Edinburgh
1971
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
1972
Tate Gallery, London (retrospective)
Falchi Arte Moderna, Milan
1973
Lister Gallery, Perth
1974
Arnolfini Gallery, Bristol
1975
Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY
1976
Galerie Angst-Orny, Munich
1973/78
Walter Moos Gallery, Toronto
1974/76/78/80/85/87
Gimpel Fils Gallery, London
1975/76/77/80
Kasahara Gallery, Osaka
1979
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, touring
1980/83
Gimpel and Weitzenhoffer, New York
1985
Gimpel Fils, 'Every Picture Tells a Story'
1986-87
Ulster Museum, Belfast, Guinness Hop Store, Dublin, and Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh
1987
On the Wall Gallery, Belfast
Taylor Galleries, Dublin
1990/97
Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
1991/96
Kerlin Gallery, Dublin
1992
Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York
David Anderson Gallery, Buffalo, NY
1993
Tate Gallery, London - Room 26
1998
Irish Museum of Modern Art, Kilmainham, Dublin
2000
Beaux Arts, London