The Planet on the Table
David Anfam

[N.B. The plate & figure references in this text relate to the essay as it was published but most cannot be shown here for copyright reasons]

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things
—Wallace Stevens

The puritanical impulse motivating twentieth-century abstraction had its necessary adversary: in pursuit of the absolute, it repressed or purged an impure flip side. Piet Mondrian’s early depictions of flowers and girls, Kasimir Malevich’s volte-face into figuration during the late 1920s, and the carnivalesque biomorphs of Wassily Kandinsky’s final decade in Paris are but three signal instances of this unruly material which the spartan straight line, the black square or explosive color had aimed to transcend. Later in the century, the equivocation recurred. For example, several leading Abstract Expressionists—including Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Philip Guston—chose at one key stage or another to allow resurgent imagery to overcome their erstwhile allegiance to non-objectivity. Moreover, the two greatest exponents of pictorial high modernism, Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, held back from the brink of utter abstraction in deference to the manifold suasions of sensual perception. Yet with modernism’s utopian aspirations consigned to history, its polemic against the recognizable world recedes to a thread in a broader philosophical warp and weft that modern painters have woven between the here and now and the beyond. The British artist William Scott bridged such divergent ends in a career spanning more than fifty years. As Scott once remarked, ‘I am an abstract artist in the sense that I abstract. I cannot be called non-figurative while I am still interested in the modern magic of space, primitive sex forms, the sensual and the erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life.’[1]
That Scott’s fertile dialog between the particular and the universal, the earthy and the immaterial, is still sometimes liable to disconcert us reflects an overall singularity which renders him hard to pigeonhole. Probably the first British artist of note to visit Pollock on Long Island, in 1953, when he also began a good friendship in Manhattan with Mark Rothko (who reciprocated by staying at his at Hallatrow in Somerset while en route to Cornwall in 1959), and this precocious trip to the United States merely confirmed, in Sir Alan Bowness’s pithy conclusion, ‘Scott’s sense of being a European artist.’[2] Indeed, Scott’s stance was frequently more in tune with such Continental counterparts as Alberto Giacometti, Giorgio Morandi and Antoni Tàpies than with such native phenomena as 1940s Neo-Romanticism (which, after a brief flirtation, he soon eschewed) or the disquieted last-ditch humanism of Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.[3] Even his nationality was of course compound, not English but rather Northern Irish-Scots. Crucially, the plebian objects, eroticism and tactility that feature throughout Scott’s work constituted a retort to the Platonic bias at the root of avant-garde abstraction. Namely, that the ideal is somehow more ‘real’ than the quotidian. Here Scott’s sensibility found the first of various echoes in a thinker who might otherwise prove wildly remote from him in personality and style—the other ‘WS, that is, the American poet Wallace Stevens. Among Stevens’s most startlingly memorable lines are those that upend the gist of Platonism’s anti-materialist fallacy:

Beauty is momentary in the mind—
The fitful tracing of a portal;
But in the flesh it is immortal.[4]

In short, the cerebral can hardly be said to have ever breathed life compared to what has been, even if transiently, incarnate. To cite a favorite notion of Stevens’s, ‘poverty’ is synonymous with a state in which the imagination fails to inhabit the physical. Scott’s first fully mature paintings dating from around 1950 onwards initiated his imaginative twist on the commonplace in a spirit akin, as it were, to Stevens’s subtly counter-intuitive logic.

At face value, Still Life with Table Top (pl. 1) and its companion pieces suggest a debt to the kind of wartime Picassos that Scott saw in the latter’s joint exhibition (with Matisse) at the Victoria and Albert Museum in the winter of 1945-46, such as Skull, Sea Urchins and Lamp on Table (fig.1). Actually, the differences between the two are as telling as any similarities, indicating Scott’s creative misprision of his precursor. First, Scott countered Picasso’s angular contortions with a handmade geometry—evident in the discs, the table’s sharp rectangle and the cross and triangle above—that lends a metaphysical air to the humble elements. The frying pan, the eggs and the table (perhaps augmented by a toasting fork) became major protagonists in Scott’s pictorial troupe. But their muteness is totally opposed to what Picasso wished his ostensibly comparable objects to declare, as he exclaimed to Pierre Daix: ‘You see, a saucepan can also cry out!’[5] In Scott’s entire oeuvre, virtually nothing cries out, although there is certainly motion, not least that movement of one thing to another which betokens desire. Secondly, whereas Picasso’s grisaille was a passing malaise, indexed to the bleak deprivation of occupied France, Scott’s bespoke a lifetime’s climate of experience.
Referring to his severe childhood in Scotland and Ulster, Scott remembered: ‘I was brought up in a grey world: the garden I knew was a cemetery and we had no fine furniture. The objects I painted were the symbols of the life I knew best and the pictures which looked most like mine were painted on walls a thousand years ago.’[6] Every text on Scott repeats this reminiscence for the altogether valid reason that it was his credo. What should we make of this ‘austerity’? A biographical view would attribute it to race or culture, the hard-bitten tenor of a Celtic inheritance, a trait later found in, say, the threadbare minimalism of Samuel Beckett or the grittiness of James Kelman's novels. But that is not the whole story, since Scott elevated it to a guiding aesthetic: ‘I find beauty in plainness.’[7] This is the condition that Stevens elsewhere identified with the clarity of wintry bareness, a zero degree of consciousness:

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir[8]

As Stevens implied, imagination (‘savoir’) must therefore stir from inertia to enliven the inanimate. Accordingly, Still Life with Table Top announced Scott’s lengthy preoccupation with animating the dramatis personae of ‘poverty’—his gaunt pots, pans, eggs and so forth, which subsequently he further reduced to flat, enigmatic semaphores.

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