Beschreibung:

William Scott CBE RA (1913-1989) Red and Red (WS119) (1967) Oil on canvas, 152 x 152.4cm (60 x 60'') Archive number 0328 Provenance: Given by the artist to a collecter, from whom purchased by the present owner, c.2008. Private Collection, Dublin. Literature: Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. 3 1960-1968, Thames and Hudson in association with William Scott Foundation, London 2013, cat. no. 641, illustrated p.275. Exhibited: Hanover Gallery, 'William Scott Paintings 1967', London, 17 October - 10 November 1967, No.7; Tate Gallery, 'William Scott Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches, 1938-1971', London, 19 April - 29 May 1972. In 1967 William Scott completed a large-scale work, Abstract Painting, a joint commission from the Arts Council of Ireland and RTÉ, to be installed in a new administration building, part of Scott Tallon Walkers Donnybrook complex for the national broadcaster. Over 3.5 metres in width, the composition is, even for Scott, exceptionally spare, with just one motif, rotated through 90�� and repeated. The palette is exceptionally warm. The same holds true for this painting, which the William Scott Catalogue Raisonné relates specifically to two earlier works, from 1965, Reflection and Untitled. While the RTÉ Abstract Painting plays on the idea of a displaced reflection, Red and Red and its predecessors do so even more boldly. Scott held onto Red and Red, eventually giving it as a present to an art collector, who sold it in 2008. Throughout Scotts working life, its evident that he periodically tended towards abstraction without ever entirely severing ties with representation. The early 1950s and then the early 1960s saw the most notable examples of this. In the 1960s, it followed on from several years during which he made increasingly densely packed and highly textural still lifes stylised, certainly, but unmistakably still lifes. Perhaps he felt he had arrived at the culmination of this process. In any case, he began to streamline his compositions. Looking back, he described it as a process of elimination. In practice that meant fewer, simpler forms and larger areas of flat or virtually flat colour. In his Berlin Blues series, the dominant colour was a pigment he was greatly taken by when he came across it in Berlin, called Pariserblau. It is as if he was, at the time, spurred to explore an opposite to the cool blue and white palette of the Berlin Blues, experimenting with combinations of warm, sometimes intensely warm reds and ochres. Born in Greenock, Scotland, in 1913, Scott grew up in Enniskillen, his fathers hometown, and showed aptitude for art from an early age. Encouraged by his progressive art teacher, Kathleen Bridle he studied at the Royal Academy School in London. He went on to develop an elegant pictorial language applied in various ways to three consistent areas of subject matter: the still life, the human figure and the landscape. Aidan Dunne, October 2019 William Scott CBE RA (1913-1989) Red and Red (WS119) (1967) Oil on canvas, 152 x 152.4cm (60 x 60'') Archive number 0328 Provenance: Given by the artist to a collecter, from whom purchased by the present owner, c.2008. Private Collection, Dublin. Literature: Sarah Whitfield (ed.), William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings, Vol. 3 1960-1968, Thames and Hudson in association with William Scott Foundation, London 2013, cat. no. 641, illustrated p.275. Exhibited: Hanover Gallery, 'William Scott Paintings 1967', London, 17 October - 10 November 1967, No.7; Tate Gallery, 'William Scott Paintings, Drawings and Gouaches, 1938-1971', London, 19 April - 29 May 1972. In 1967 William Scott completed a large-scale work, Abstract Painting, a joint commission from the Arts Council of Ireland and RTÉ, to be installed in a new administration building, part of Scott Tallon Walkers Donnybrook complex for the national broadcaster. Over 3.5 metres in width, the composition is, even for Scott, exceptionally spare,