Sean Scully

A question of some moment in Renaissance thought was whether sculpture was inferior, equal, or superior to painting. The texts in which the issue was mooted were called paragone, in which the two arts were compared, usually to the detriment of sculpture. Sculpting was a dirty, noisy, earthy activity. The sculptor was an artisan—think of the fact that sentencing someone to “hard labor” has meant condemning him to break rocks. The painter, by contrast, was an artist, and the subtext of the paragone is the social ascent of the painter, from the status of artisan to that of humanist scholar—a poet, say, or a philosopher. Painters sit while sculptors stand. Painters in their studios are elegantly garbed while sculptors are covered head to foot with stone dust. Seated before the easel, exerting no greater physical effort than is required to hold a small brush, the painter can listen to poets reciting sonnets, or scholars reading aloud from the classics, or singers and musicians filling the space with sweet harmonies. The spirit of the paragone is nowhere better expressed than in Jan Vermeer’s The Art of Painting, recently on loan to the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. An artist, shown from behind, is painting the Muse of History, using a female model. He is handsomely dressed in slashed velvet and wears a beret. The model, in a blue silk gown, is crowned with laurel, and she holds, together with a horn of polished brass, a copy of Thucydides. Light pours into the studio, illuminating a large ornamental map on the facing wall. Imagine what would happen to so rich a map—or to the opulent Oriental hangings—if they were in a sculptor’s studio instead! The painter’s costume, incidentally, belongs to an earlier century. So Vermeer situates the painter at the intersection of historical time and geographical space, since the place where he is painting is shown on the map. He is clearly a person of refinement and learning.

The history of art is full of paragone-style disputations: between craft and art, for example, or figuration and abstraction. But paragones also appear when the structure of society begins to give way, making it possible for a previously disfranchised group to move upward, or when an enfranchised group finds its status challenged, as with men by women today. In the Renaissance, sculptors more or less accepted the arguments from the other side and aspired to find modes of expression that emulated the condition of painting, using, for example, panels with very low relief rather than freestanding figures. At a certain point, at least in the history of art, the terms of the contest are altered so profoundly that the roles are actually reversed. In the present art world, for example, painting is very much on the defensive. And if there is anything to such reports from the front as Susan Faludi’s, men have lost any sense of place or point by comparison with women, whose consciousness has been raised and their various superiorities celebrated. So men are uncertain whether to become more like women, as sculptors sought to emulate painters, or to find some elusive masculine essence.

The two paragones are in fact connected. Painting was challenged in the seventies, when increasing numbers of women undertook to become artists, and feminist theory began to characterize painting as something by and for white males, at the same time deconstructing the institutional structures that artificially supported male privilege. “Time was,” Kant writes, “when metaphysics was entitled the Queen of all the sciences … Now, however, the changed fashion of the time brings her only scorn; a matron outcast and forsaken.” Until the seventies, painting had been Queen of all the arts for most of art’s history. “No conflict in its history,” Thomas McEvilly has written in The Exile’s Return, “has been as severe as that of the last generation: painting’s disgrace and exile, around 1965.”

In my view, 1965 is a few years too early. Pop Art, which flourished in that year, merely shifted the content of painting to vernacular subjects, without calling into question painting itself. Roy Lichtenstein tweaked the pretensions surrounding the Abstract Expressionist brushstroke—but he did so by painting pictures of brushstrokes. There were no female Pop artists. Feminist issues were at best marginal in the uprising of 1968. But Linda Nochlin’s immensely influential “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” was published in 1971, generating a powerful body of cultural criticism. The feminist critique of painting, moreover, was not merely an isolated engagement in sexual politics. It went with a leftish revulsion against the commodification of art. Artists sought ways to circumvent the institutional complex of the art world—galleries and collections and careers—and to make museums more socially responsive. Later in the decade, painting became further stigmatized, under the auspices of multiculturalism, as merely the way Western culture expressed itself artistically.

It took a certain courage to persist as a painter under this triple indictment. There was a brief, intense moment in the early eighties when it seemed that painting had made a comeback and a countercharge. Neo-Expressionist painting was ecstatically received as evidence that the history of art was back on track. That coincided with an acquisitive appetite for art, which enabled successful painters to live fairly princely lives and even to thumb their noses at their perceived oppressors. David Salle’s humiliating images of women, for example, must be understood as being in the spirit of waving a sword at the enemy. Neo-Expressionism did not thrive for very long, though certain of its major representatives, like Eric Fischl, Julian Schnabel, and Salle himself, have continued to prosper. The resurgence of painting proved to be an interlude rather than a change in the direction of history, and it is my view that the objective configuration of the art world, which began in the seventies and has continued, with that one minor interruption, into the present moment, rules out entirely the very possibility of a comeback of painting, at least as Queen of the arts.

 

What I mean by “the objective configuration of the art world” is the way the latter became increasingly pluralistic in the seventies, as artists sought and found avenues of expression alternative to painting. They were assured that there is in the first place no special way works of art have to be, so one was free to make art out of anything and have it look whatever way one wished. Aesthetics itself was pluralized, so far as it continued to be relevant at all. And artworks were often pluralistic within themselves, as artists, casting aside the imperatives of purity that had defined high Modernism, combined media in often unprecedented ways, taking what they needed from wherever they might find it. Artists characterized themselves as making objects. Beyond question, an “object” might incorporate painting as much as videotape or stuffed animals. But that is hardly a comeback for the Queen of all the arts! Painting had become an option and a means.

Still, a pluralistic art world is a pluralistic art world. A lot of the arguments leveled at painting in the paragone of the seventies were really as weak as those to which the enemies of sculpture had recourse in the Renaissance. It was, for example, difficult to persist in indexing painting to gender when there were any number of women who were marvelous painters—Dorothea Rockburne, for example, or Jennifer Bartlett or Elizabeth Murray or Sylvia Plimack Mangold. Last month I saw a masterpiece by Sylvia Sleigh, Invitation to a Voyage, executed on fourteen panels, which translated into contemporary terms a set of ideas and feelings Watteau had exploited in Pèlerinage à l’île de Cythère. There has to be room for painting in the open disjunction of ways of making art. But even those we think of primarily as painters have in some ways been liberated by the pluralism of art: David Reed, for example, though primarily a painter, has found ways of intercombining his paintings with video or film and framing them in installations that function to direct the way viewers are to think about the paintings themselves. Inevitably, the structure of critical analysis will depend upon whether one is talking about his installations, in which paintings are components, or about the paintings those installations help one see. A correlative pluralism in art criticism, in other words, is required.

 

Sean Scully, whose name belongs on the shortest of short lists of the major painters of our time, nevertheless is of the present moment through the fact that he constructs his paintings as objects having a certain three-dimensional identity, with insets and superposed panels. He has even invented a form of three-dimensional paintings, which he refers to as Floating Paintings. Floating Paintings are on fabricated metal boxes, which hang at right angles to the wall, like the modules one associates with Minimalist sculpture—but painted with his signature stripes. Stripes even determine the motifs Scully selects for his beautiful photographs of barns or shacks or road signs, which are disclosed, so to speak, as ready-made Scullys through their bold and energetic stripedness. The stripes (or bars) with which he works are themselves, in a sense, cultural borrowings that Scully encountered on a trip to Morocco in 1969. He was intoxicated by the dyed strips of wool that became stripes when sewn together into blankets or tents.

Stripes, of course, have been used by painters for the past several decades. The French painter Daniel Buren, for example, uses stripes as a way of subverting art, robbing it of any visual interest or point of focus, repeating vertical stripes, evenly spaced and mechanically executed, in an array that can go on indefinitely. There is in Buren’s work the sullen repetitiveness of reggae. This is in no sense meant as a criticism, given Buren’s philosophy of art, but rather as an explanation of how his stripes are vehicles of political action. Scully’s stripes, by contrast, are vibrant and painterly, and often differ in width, color, and even direction, as when he inserts a panel in which stripes have widths and hues different from those of the panel that surrounds them. He is in every sense a highly humanistic artist, who sees in abstraction as he practices it a form of religious metaphysics. It was consistent with this spirit that he should leave Britain for America to settle in New York, which he viewed as the promised land: He felt that the tradition of great painting was alive in the work of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, much in the way classical learning had been kept alive in European monasteries—points of civilization and illumination within the surrounding cultural darkness.

 

There is a very intimate show of Scully’s works on paper at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Before giving oneself over to the amazingly nuanced watercolors and pastels, the prints and the photographs, one might pause at the entrance to contemplate two of his oil paintings, placed just outside the gallery. At the very least, they show the internal evolution of Scully’s stripes. Red on Cream—painted in 1976, the year after he moved permanently to America—consists of narrow reddish stripes laid horizontally across a cream ground. Molloy was done eight years later. It would have been extremely difficult, despite the fact that both paintings are made entirely of stripes, to have predicted a work like Molloy on the basis of Red on Cream—or, for that matter, to retrodict from Molloy to the painting of 1976.

Superficially, Red on Cream appears to exude the spirit of Minimalism, which was very powerful at that time. Molloy, by contrast, could have been done by no one but Scully. It consists of three (or four) vertical panels. One panel contains two green horizontal bars—too wide to think of simply as stripes—which are either on an orange ground or separated by orange bars. The orange-green panel is superposed onto a squarish panel, consisting this time of vertical bars in red and black. There is another panel on the extreme right, also of vertical black and red bars. This panel has a deep relationship, in form and color, with the squarish panel, very much as if the red-black-red pattern of bars continues behind the orange-green panel, which disrupts the rhythm. The orange-green panel is an outsider and even perhaps a kind of virus. The upper and lower edges of the panels are not perfectly aligned, and there is no continuous surface to the work as a whole: Some of the panels are in front, some behind, which is in part what I meant in describing Scully’s more recent works as objects (though certainly not as sculptures). I have read that Molloy’s red stripes are of “the kind used in Maestà.” Maestà, by Duccio di Buoninsegna, is the supreme masterpiece of Sienese painting. It shows the Virgin enthroned, with the Christ Child on her lap, symmetrically flanked by groups of holy personages on either side. Whether there is in fact this affinity, the thought that there might be—that the orange-green panel stands to the red-black panels in the relationship in which the Madonna stands to her adorers—suggests that Scully has achieved in Molloy the kind of near-religious feeling he believed that great painting was invented to express.

This is true of Red on Cream as well, although less obviously. Before he left London, Scully’s paintings were grids or plaids that, however well received, did not convey, in his view, the spiritual qualities he came to New York to seek. For the first five or so years of his residence here, he worked with the kind of evenly spaced narrow stripes Red on Cream employs. Since these were perceived as Minimalist works of a very high order, they brought Scully considerable recognition. He did not see them as Minimalist at all, but rather as romantic and religious. I suppose, seeing the cream as light coming through the closely spaced bars, one could see a kind of allegory. But in beginning to study the painting itself, one recognizes that there is a quality of searching in the way the stripes inch across the canvas. The edges have a subtle tentativeness despite the way they are regimented. The wider kind of stripe in such paintings as Molloy makes retroactively clear that Scully’s intentions were not Minimalist in the earlier painting, despite appearances. The bar-stripe, with its delicately fading and dilating edges, is unmistakably a declaration of affinity with Rothko, whose work Scully hugely admires (and whom he wrote about tellingly in London’s Times Literary Supplement, on the 1998 Rothko retrospective at the Whitney).

Indeed, one can see Scully’s work as carrying forward, almost alone, the concept of painting with which the New York School is rightly identified. I have often reflected on the fact that whatever unites them, the works of no two Abstract Expressionist painters look alike. Unlike the Impressionists, who always resembled one another, the Abstract Expressionists were never interestingly similar in style. They are so different, for example, that had Rothko never existed, we could not imagine a style like his on the basis of what the others had done. Scully had discovered a style of painting in which Abstract Expressionism continues to exist, but the architecture of his paintings belongs entirely to the present moment.

What is astonishing about the works on paper is the way Scully has been able to adapt the spirit of his formal vocabulary to the quite different demands of other media—like watercolor, for example, or pastel. The bars and stripes and checkerboard squares of oil paintings have a layered quality—they are visibly built up, layer upon layer, with the submerged layers allowed to show through the final one. They imply wide brushes and great physical strength to move the nearly viscous pigment and to keep it within boundaries. Pastel involves rubbing friable chalk over toothed paper, which in its nature confers a certain sparkling luminosity to the forms, and it is responsive to differences in pressure. The principle of pastel, Scully once told me, is like that of putting on makeup. The watercolors demand an entirely different set of reflexes. To paint a bar in watercolor requires an ability to begin and end it without puddling, and to achieve the sparkling translucency of its washes without allowing it to pool.

A major exhibition of Scully’s works on paper opened in January at the Albright-Knox gallery in Buffalo, in case the Metropolitan’s “Sean Scully on Paper” should pique your appetite for more. And I have not even touched on the suite of photographs, or the exquisite illuminations for Heart of Darkness, or Joyce’s Pomes Penyeach, included in the show.

Scully’s historical importance lies in the way he has brought the great achievement of Abstract Expressionist painting into the contemporary moment—and in a way overcome the terms of the paragone that sent painting into exile. It goes without saying that historical importance is not the kind that Scully wishes his art to achieve. The paragones locate the work in the very history that his paintings strive, whatever their medium, to overcome, in favor of something exalted and elusive and universal. As in The Art of Painting, for example.

February 21, 2000