Three years ago, I visited the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, in Venice, to see the 16th-century church of the same name, designed by Andrea Palladio. This was during the Venice Biennale, so the church was also hosting an exhibition called “Human” by the Irish-born American abstract artist Sean Scully.
I was both intrigued and annoyed by the show; intrigued because I had never seen so many works by Scully in one place before, and annoyed because the installation seemed to compete with the church itself. A giant tower of colorful panels rose up below the central dome, and in other spaces, Scully’s watery brush work seemed to dissolve the church itself, flooding it in the ubiquitous water of Venice’s canals and lagoon. The show also included touching figurative sketches, which is rare for Scully. He is a thoroughly well-branded artist, and his work is most often encountered in museums singularly, one large painting in a gallery of other abstract works, suggesting a gorgeous carpet of color, like an enticing decorative object.
Now there is an opportunity to see the full scope of Scully’s career in a generous and comprehensive survey of his painting since he emerged as a young partisan for abstraction in London in the early 1970s. “Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas” opened in April at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, with more than 100 works, including some of his most monumental paintings, along with drawings, woodcuts, etchings and aquatints. It is a seductive show, and may convert skeptics, especially those who feel Scully has been too settled for too long in his personal comfort zone of big, brick-like grids of bold color.
Scully was born in Ireland in 1945, and emerged on the scene as abstraction — especially large, heroic, painterly abstraction — was largely in retreat. His early work was inspired, in part, by a visit to Morocco, where he encountered a rich legacy of textile works. It was there that he began considering an idea that has preoccupied him ever since: how geometry can inspire and suppress order and chaos.
Among the earliest works on view in the Philadelphia exhibition (first seen in a slightly smaller version at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) is Scully’s 1972 “Harvard Frame Painting,” in which sacking and fabric are woven on a frame into an irregular grid of overlapping and woven bands. Despite its title, “Frame Painting” is essentially sculptural, existing in a narrow plane of three-dimensional space. It also raises the central issues of abstraction that Scully would explore in his first decades: How strict a grid? How clean the lines? How to control the tension between surface and depth? Should all this be austere or sensuous?
His early responses lived in the world of mod fashion colors and the computer fetish of the 1970s and ’80s. He must have depleted a few warehouses full of masking tape to keep all his lines digitally crisp and sharply edged. Works like “Overlay #11” from 1974 are typical: Line for line, the grid is strict, but the use of different colors and densities, and the subtle overlapping of lines, creates multiple grids within the grids, rhythmic patterns that strike the eye like a fusion of Philip Glass and Mondrian.
Later, the masking tape comes off, the edges become free-form and the paintings go from digital to analogue. The grids are looser and the paint, applied wet on wet, suggests yet more ideas about depth, layers within layers on the surface, through which you sense an “other side” to the two-dimensional canvas or panel. As soon as you can see through a painting, it also begins to suggest architecture, a sense of space in front and behind, and the possibility of passing through.
The architectural presence of Scully’s work is furthered by the scale of his largest paintings, the brick-like patterning of many works, and the physical cobbling together of multiple panels, including insets and overlaid pieces. One begins to think in terms of doors, hatches, coffers and windows, and yet there is often a sense of impenetrability, as if the walls suggest the possibility of passage yet limit egress. These walls can feel like a terminus, defining the impassable limits of a prisonlike space.
Advertisement
Scully has certainly limited his concerns to a very small subset of abstraction. The larger field includes a host of ideas that continue to animate other abstract painters: Is there a focus to the image or are its events evenly distributed? Does the painting suggest mathematical or biomorphic ideas? Is it mapping another reality or avoiding any sense of reality at all?
For the past 50 years, Scully has resided in the small but fertile province of the grid, rotating the crops of his color fields to avoid depleting the soil. Curiously, he reminds me a bit of Romantic English landscape artist John Constable: infinitely inspired by what is near to hand, deeply at home, keenly alert, as only a provincial can be, to the nuances of the space he inhabits. Scully finds analogues in his home place for larger themes from art history, so in his 2015 “Doric Blue and Blue,” the grid resolves into the pure brushstroke, the squarish daub of Cézanne. In the four panels of the 2000 “Land Sea Sky” and other more recent works, Rothko is summoned. In yet other images, the grid becomes mere substrate for cultivating Barnett Newman’s “zips,” now laid out horizontally for better yield.
Perhaps the most touching works in the Philadelphia show are those that suggest the longer arc of Scully’s career, from purity to messiness, rigidity to freedom, self-containment to self-expression.
The 2002 “Mooseurach,” named after a Bavarian town where Scully maintains a studio, has bits of red or salmon and blue and green peaking through the interstitial spaces of his darker, more somber-colored bricks. These hints of color suggest light and fire, sky and sunset, cold and heat, while also giving us a sense of the depth of color underneath the color. The particular presence of the brown or tan or white we see on a densely painted canvas is determined not just by the pigment or the light in the room, but by the colors beneath the surface color. So these glimpses of color are both metaphors for things in life and small indexical signs of how Scully creates those illusions. They are fantasy and process at the same time.
They also are worlds away from the strict, surface patterns of the artist’s early work, as if he has found freedom or release from the grid space he laid out a half-century ago. One thinks of Richard II’s speech in prison, as he tries to hammer out an imaginary world from his confinement. Like Richard, Scully has begot “a generation of still-breeding thoughts,/ And these same thoughts people this little world.”
That’s an impressive accomplishment for any artist: to escape their comfort zone without ever leaving it. The Philadelphia survey takes us along for that ride, and it’s a moving journey.
Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas Through July 31 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. philamuseum.org.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK6zwNJmnKeslafBorXNppynrF9nfXN%2BjmlsaGpnZMCmrc1mqpytnKHGbrHXoaCboaRivam1y5qbnqSgnbaiew%3D%3D