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Patrick Scott HRHA (b.1921) CROSS (POLYPTYCH) signed, inscribed and dated [1973] on reverse...

Currency:EUR Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:20,000.00 - 30,000.00 EUR
Patrick Scott HRHA (b.1921) CROSS (POLYPTYCH) signed, inscribed and dated [1973] on reverse...
Patrick Scott HRHA (b.1921)
CROSS (POLYPTYCH)
signed, inscribed and dated [1973] on reverse
tempera and gold leaf on unprimed canvas
244 by 244cm., 96 by 96in.
Provenance: Purchased directly from the artist by the present owner
€20,000-€30,000 (£13,000-£19,500 sterling approx.)
Patrick Scott is best known for his Goldpaintings, a series of works which
typically comprise flat bands or spheres of gold leaf and white tempera on
unprimed canvas. ‘Cross’ (1973) is a good representative example of the genre.
In 1964, Scott first generated this idiom which represents his graduation into a
totally abstract Minimalism. Since their emergence, the Goldpaintings have
dominated the artist's work and, nearly forty years later, he continues to
explore the potentialities of the format.
The emergence of the Goldpaintings represented a dramatic turning point in
Scott's artistic development. Earlier work was figurative and, in the early
'sixties, comprised soft-focus images in earthy browns suggestive of the Irish
climate in wetland bogs. This phase was followed by the explosive, dripped
'Device' series, redolent of atomic detonation, and carried out in protest at
the development of the H-bomb. However visually different the restrained
Goldpaintings may seem compared to the more sensuous preceding work, they
represent the culmination of a process of increasing abstraction of form which
had been ongoing since Pat first took up painting. The geometrical nature of the
Goldpaintings was anticipated, for example, in various earlier works exploring
the underpinning support structures of functional objects such as a table, a
pier, or electrical cables - a legacy perhaps of his architectural training, and
his work in the practice of Michael Scott.
‘Cross’ was painted in 1973, when Scott had worked through an initial
experimental phase with the new materials and had arrived at an artistic
maturity manifest in a taut aesthetic of balance and harmony. This painting
comprises four identical square panels, each comprising an asymmetrical,
rectilinear pattern of 8cm wide bands of gold and of tempera. The arrangement of
the four panels combines to create the symmetrical cruciform of the title. The
width of the bands is based on the standard size of the gold leaf squares he
uses, and these form the module on which virtually all of the Goldpaintings are
based. The quadripartite format seen in Cross first appeared as early as 1965 in
significant works such as Goldpainting 34 which was recently donated by the Bank
of Ireland to the Irish Museum of Modern Art, and shown in the major Patrick
Scott retrospective in 2001, at the Hugh Lane Gallery. In such earlier versions,
it was intended that the owner/curator could rearrange the panels to make new
shapes. These works therefore anticipate the interactive art of the later 20th
century. Despite the capacity to intervene with the piece "while the composition
may change, the disposition remains intact". In the case of ‘Cross’,
intervention may not have been intended, given the specific form indicated by
the title.
‘Cross’ is particularly interesting in the context of Minimalism, a movement
originating in the United States, and deriving from the aesthetic philosophy of
the artist Ad Reinhardt. The essential idea was that art works should be
relieved of the necessity to imitate objects in the real world through the
traditional methods of illusionism. According to the theory, rather than
referring to other objects, the art work should be an end in itself and to
represent nothing except itself - just like any other object in the physical
world such as a plate or a wheel. This idea presented challenges to artists who
sought to find a means of expression purified of any resemblance to another
object. To aid the process, the theory demanded that painterliness, as manifest
in gestural and impastoed brushwork, should be avoided as it invited a reading
of the surface beyond the materiality of the paint. Scott responded to this in
the flat, even surfaces of his work.
Patrick Scott had the opportunity to see abstract work by Ad Reinhardt when he
visited the major exhibition of contemporary American art, Art USA Now, shown at
the Hugh Lane Gallery in 1964 in the same year that the Goldpaintings emerged.
Significantly, Reinhardt's Abstract Painting no. 4 (Johnson Collection, 1961) in
that exhibition featured a square canvas dominated by a cruciform shape. Scott
was never simply a follower of Reinhardt or of American Minimalism however, and
his work was not subjected to the same criticisms of cold, inhuman asceticism.
Nor did he subscribe to the machine production methods which Minimalism
advocated, preferring to venerate the arts of painting and guilding by applying
the materials with the meticulous care of the
craftsman. His materials are tactile and, unlike the deliberately dark
negativity of Reinhardt, are affirmative in their blond tonality. While the
tonal range of ‘Cross’ is, typically, narrow, visual interest is held through
the contrast of texture: the rough, unrefined surface of the canvas versus the
precious sheen of the gold leaf. While the artist does not advocate a spiritual
reading of his work, it evokes a Zen-like contemplative mood, reflecting the
artist's philosophical explorations.
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