The Brooklyn Rail

In 1983 the English art critic John Russell, commenting on the newly-executed series of paintings by Sean Scully that are now on view at Lisson Gallery, remarked, “Whoever said that abstract painting was finished?” Adorning the walls of the gallery with their chromatic exuberance and geometric poetry, the seven dazzling and seemingly nonrepresentational paintings nonetheless invoke the vertical stance of the human body and the vertiginous towers of New York City. Executed in his second-story loft at 110 Duane Street in the early 1980s, these mesmerizing works mark Scully’s shift from Minimalist rigor to a more painterly facture, from an ethos of fabrication to one of feeling.

Titled Duane Street: 1981–1983, this museum-quality exhibition focuses on three critical years that show Scully’s aspiration to convert the geometric modularity of Minimalism into expressive geometry. Undertaken around the age of thirty-five, these grand-scale paintings mark the painter’s return to his reverence of Manet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, and Klee, whose works he had encountered and imbibed in the National Gallery in London during his teenage years and twenties. The “Duane Street” paintings deploy a new pictorial language that aims to reconcile the uniformity, obsessive rigor, rationality, literalism, and objectivity of American Minimalism with the exuberance, tenderness, sentiment, metaphor, and subjectivity of European expressionism.

Incorporating sculptural elements and architectonic structure, Scully’s multipanel works propose an abstraction made capable of triggering iconological and allegorical readings. As Steven Henry Madoff notes in the exhibition essay “The Torrent: Sean Scully in Duane Street, 1981–83,” Scully’s “stripes of color are understood in their trajectory from line to band to having a fleshy quality, a thickness not simply of oil and pigment but of human heft, existence, trial, and passage.” With such titles as Araby, Precious, and Adoration, Scully sets out on his journey to integrate the visual and verbal, abstraction and representation, the autotelic and autobiographical.

Painted with and without masking tape and negotiating between Minimalism’s effacement of authorship and Abstract Expressionism’s heroic gesturalism, the horizontal and vertical stripes of Araby (1981) attach themselves to a young boy’s infatuation with his friend’s sister in the renowned short story by James Joyce, first published in 1914 in Dubliners, that shares its title with the painting. Scully’s work binds the objectivity of the tessellated stripes to the subjectivity of human brushwork. At once an expression of joy and an apprehension of the figure-ground sensibility of Op art, Araby and Precious (1981) are two seminal paintings that mark Scully’s departure from the use of masking tape, liberating line from the mechanical character of his solemn and austere Minimalist work of the later 1970s. These two lavish paintings, each built from multiple panels, usher in Scully’s interest in multipanel work, along with works that approach the status of relief sculpture. This creative impulse would ultimately give way to the inset canvas in such key 1987 works as Precious (titled identically as the above 1981 painting), Blue, and Caress.

The inset, which remains one of the predominant elements of Scully’s visual vocabulary, is an enigmatic portal whose significance awaits the spectator’s response and interpretation. One clue to the riddle of the inset is a photograph of one of Scully’s paintings from which the inlaid panel has been lifted so as to reveal his toddler Oisín in a pink cardigan or nightgown, extending his right arm forward.¹ As such, the inset operates as an allegorical device that allows Scully to bring abstract painting and life into direct contact.

Epic in scale and occupying the south wall of the gallery space, Backs and Fronts (1981) testifies to a pivotal moment in Scully’s departure from Minimalism. The sum of eleven vertical panels of varying scales, Backs and Fronts was displayed at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (currently MoMA PS1) in 1982 in Critical Perspectives: Curators and Artists, a notable exhibition curated by Joseph Masheck. Originally consisting of the second through the fifth panels of the current configuration and titled Four Musicians after Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921), Scully added canvases not only to expand the perimeter so that it was no longer a distinct quadrilateral, but also to reinvent the painting’s surface as a sculptural articulation of space. Whereas horizontal and vertical stripes in bright and dark hues give shape and expression to the abutting canvases, the surface of the fourth panel from the right yields a shallow space. As parts of the edges of the painting ascend and descend rhythmically, the painting suggests the sensibility of vaudeville blues or jazz.

While Backs and Fronts might be read as a paean to Mondrian’s formal inventiveness and fondness for jazz or a nod to Frank Stella’s sculptural paintings of the seventies, this work also carries autobiographical narratives. “Unchained Melody,” the favorite song of Scully’s mother, a Vaudeville singer in London, resonates through Scully’s painterly stripes, as we read in Kelly Grovier’s recent book On the Line: Conversations with Sean Scully.² Yet in an interview in this book Scully also connects The Velvet Underground playing at CBGB in New York and the experimental music of John Cage as influences on his New York years of the late seventies and early eighties.³

Nine attached canvases make up Scully’s grand-scale Adoration (1982), a spectacular painting that incorporates further references to Mondrian in its grid-like pattern, to Stella through the sensibility of the “white lines” of his Black Paintings, to Donald Judd’s sets of vertically-mounted rectangular metal boxes. While Scully’s compositions undoubtedly rely upon visual citations of modernist abstraction and the New York art scene of his time, this painting’s shimmering stripes, warm palette, and title tie it also to older precedents such as the wooden shed of Giotto’s Adoration of the Magi (ca. 1320) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The three paintings titled Blame (1983), Diana (1983–97), and The Bather (1983) testify to Scully’s experimental audacity and ceaseless inventiveness. While the four-part painting The Bather refers directly to Matisse’s Bathers by the River (ca. 1916–17), the greens and blues here also recall so many of Cézanne’s paintings, such as The Bathers (1899–1904). As much as these works present painting’s facticity as a flat plane, they also disrupt that flatness as relief sculptures. Colorful surfaces here protrude and recede in space and the play of real light and cast shadow engages in an ongoing game of hide-and-seek within Scully’s wobbly lines and shimmering ribbons. As we stare at these densely layered paintings, pictorial lines and physical edges become indistinguishable, signaling those moments when reality, illusion, and abstraction reveal themselves as phenomenologically coextensive.

Where Cézanne had taken on the task of submitting the depiction of apples to shifting perspectives, a century later Scully would replace Cézanne’s apples with Mondrian’s grid, dissevering the unity of the picture surface by fragmenting it and projecting it outward into real space. Scully’s works highlight the variability and visceral character of visual perception. Fragmented and at times anamorphic, these enigmatic sculptural paintings reformulate an abstraction that is entrenched within the phenomenological, linguistic, and social realms of experience. As Heinrich Wölfflin has noted, “Visual perception is not a mirror that always remains the same; it is a living faculty of perception with its own internal history and many phases behind it.”⁴

For Scully, Minimalism alone could not move past Andy Warhol’s investigation of mechanical reproduction and the assembly line of the factory. Both the mass-cultural pragmatism of Warhol’s Marilyn Monroes or Campbell’s soup cans and the impersonal traits of Minimalism seemed ultimately to fall short of the truthfulness available to the medium of oil. As Scully has recently said, “Brushstroke is the fingerprint of the soul.”⁵ The sculptural paintings that Sean Scully created on Duane Street show us the fruits of this creative perspective, and in so doing encapsulate one of the most innovative bodies of geometric painterly abstraction created during the twentieth century.