Archive Blog – October 2018

Orange and Pink, 1957

Scott’s entry for the Carnegie Institute

In 1958, William Scott was one of the painters chosen to represent Great Britain at the Carnegie Institute’s Pittsburg International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture. The jury of award that year included Marcel Duchamp, Vincent Price and James Johnson Sweeney. Although Scott did not win (the first prize for painting was awarded to Antoni Tapies) his Orange and Pink, 1957, was praised by the critic Hilton Kramer as ‘a fine abstraction of [Scott’s] characteristic still-life themes.’ The work was likely informed by Scott’s experimentation with collage; here the textured effect he had learnt to achieve through layering paper is replicated in the layers of paint.