Sean Scully in Paris Essay by William Cook

On the occasion of Sean Scully's 78th birthday and coinciding with the artist's exhibitions at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris Pantin, France (3 June—30 September 2023) and at Houghton Hall, King’s Lynn, UK (23 April—29 October 2023), writer and art critic William Cook has written an essay looking back over Scully's artistic career.

Sean Scully in Paris

In Maison Fournaise, a smart riverside restaurant on the green edge of Paris, Sean Scully and some of his closest friends are celebrating the artist’s 78th birthday. Art buffs will know Maison Fournaise as the setting for several paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, most notably Le Déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon of the Boating Party). For the world’s leading living abstract painter, this might seem like an odd location for a birthday bash. In fact, it makes perfect sense. Scully has little in common with artists of his own generation. He’s always had a closer kinship with great artists of the past.

Scully is in good shape for a man in his late seventies. He could easily pass for ten years younger. For him, painting has always been a muscular occupation. With his Sarf London accent and his streetwise manner, you could picture him as a bouncer or a hitman in a British gangster movie – The Long Good Friday with Bob Hoskins or Get Carter with Michael Caine. He’s a warm and generous friend, but you wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of him. He has the bearlike gait of a fairground wrestler. His pale blue eyes pin you to the wall.

Today’s boating party isn’t quite as elegant as the party in that Renoir painting (fashions have declined since the 1880s – baseball caps have replaced straw boaters) but the mood is much the same. A long languid lunch beside the river, bright sunlight bouncing off the water, the hubbub of tipsy conversation – nothing to do and all day to do it. Midsummer memories are made of this. After we’ve cut the cake and sung ‘Happy Birthday’, we get back on the boat that’s brought us here and begin our return journey, back into town. The other guests gather in the bow and Sean comes inside to shelter from the sun. Over lunch, the conversation has mainly been about Paris – in particular Sean’s powerful new show at Thaddaeus Ropac’s Pantin gallery, which opened last night. Now we sit down together, and as our boat chugs along the River Seine, I ask him about some of the other places in his life.

He begins by talking about London, where he spent his troubled childhood (he was born in Dublin in 1945 and came to the Big Smoke as a small boy). The details of his homelife are harrowing. His father was a barber from an Irish family who went to prison for desertion from the British Army. His mother came from a mining family in Durham. His parents fought like cat and dog. Money was in short supply (‘It was extraordinarily stressful – there would be these explosive fights’). His childhood home was enlivened by colourful, eccentric lodgers – a transvestite comedian, a boxer with a glass jaw. Art was a distant dream, something strange and unfamiliar, the tantalising promise of a better life, somewhere far away, almost out of sight: a Picasso poster on a classroom wall; the Stations of the Cross in his local Catholic Church... ‘We used to go to Trafalgar Square to feed the pigeons,’ he recalls. ‘My parents didn’t even know that the National Gallery had pictures in it – we were standing right next to it, and they had no clue it was a picture gallery.’

He became a teenage hooligan, running around with street gangs. ‘Most of my friends – half of them at least – from my childhood are dead,’ he told me, the first time I met him. ‘They went to prison, they got into drugs, violence of one kind or another.’ He could have ended up the same way, in jail, or worse, if art hadn’t given him a way out. He left school at 15 and got a factory job, but then he discovered night school. ‘I got a second chance,’ he says. ‘I don’t know why I did it. It was like getting religion. I got knowledge.’ He studied life drawing (‘I couldn’t draw very well in the beginning, but I studied like a person possessed, and I got real good at it’) and then he discovered painting. It blew him away. ‘There was something about it which made me kind of crazy when I looked at it. I just loved it so much. I wanted to be like them.’ Who’s them? I ask him. ‘Them! Paul Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Derain, Monet, Cézanne, Manet – I wanted to be like them!’ And so he applied to art school. He got eleven rejections. ‘Kingston, Wimbledon, Central, St Martin’s, the Slade, the Royal College, Goldsmiths – I forget all the others – and they all said no. Every letter starts out with, “We regret to inform you...” It was like being stabbed.’ The last letter was from Croydon College of Art. ‘I opened the letter and it said, “We are delighted to inform you…” I was in! I was going to art school. Oh wow! I couldn’t believe it! On our first day we had to draw something in our pockets, and I drew my keyring. It’s a drawing I still have.’ Unlike a lot of artists, he never lost the youthful idealism of his student days – his lust for life, his thirst for knowledge, his insatiable appetite for art.

Thankful to be thrown a lifeline, Sean seized this precious opportunity with both hands. He worked hard and kept his head down. ‘I paid the price – I did what I had to do.’ How high a price, I ask him. ‘Give up your spare time. Stop worrying about yourself, stop looking in the mirror, stop being a narcissist, stop wasting your time, find something that’s bigger than you.’ For him, that thing was art. ‘I wanted to be like Van Gogh, I wanted to be like Gauguin. I wanted to be like those guys.’ He aimed for the top right from the start.

From Croydon, he went on to Newcastle University, where he took a first-class degree in Fine Art. ‘Newcastle was seismic – Newcastle was incredible for me.’ He stayed with his grandparents, in their house in Durham. ‘We had an outside toilet – you had to use a flashlight. My grandad was a coal miner, as were his brothers. They were all coal miners, and they all died the same way’ (spend a lifetime working underground and the chances that you’ll end up with severe lung damage, fighting for every breath, are pretty high).

‘Your gift is colour,’ said one of his tutors at Newcastle, Michael Brick. ‘Your problem is where to put it.’ For Scully, this was a eureka moment. In Croydon he’d discovered the joy of painting. Now, in Newcastle, he learned how to control it. ‘I found my artistic voice in Croydon. I found my intellect in Newcastle, a sense of structure. Croydon was a fabulous school to go to. It was about instinctive painting, but after a while that kind of painting will fall in on itself. It won’t keep going. You’ve got to have something to pin it onto, and that was what I found in Newcastle – it had a strong intellectual rigour.’

He’s sustained that intellectual rigour throughout his long and lucrative career. ‘If I painted expressionistically without structure, I would kill myself,’ he says. ‘It’s the structure that allows me to survive. I’m constantly working with a kind of emotional containment. It’s rather like a lion in a cage.’ Like a poet working within a tight rhyme structure, the restraints he imposes on his paintings discipline and channel them. They give them power. ‘There’s a tremendous physical dynamic about me, but it’s intellectually contained.’

Scully sold out his first one-man show, at London’s Rowan Gallery, a remarkable achievement. He landed a plum teaching job at Chelsea School of Art. He could have stayed in Britain and pursued a comfortable career. Instead, he relocated to New York, a bold move at a time when few British artists dared to cross the Atlantic. This wasn’t merely a brief sabbatical. As always, Scully went all in. Later, looking back, he asked his wife, the artist Liliane Tomasko, ‘Why did I leave my fabulous job in Chelsea? Why did I leave all that to go to work on a building site in New York and pick a fight with Frank Stella?’ ‘Because you can,’ she told him, ‘and because you’re fucking crazy.’

‘In 1975 the hegemony of New York seemed inviolate – untouchable,’ he recalls. ‘It was tyrannical, puritanical, virtually impenetrable, and I managed to penetrate it, by sheer will. I know that people used to make fun of me. I know that I was the butt of jokes. They made fun of my intensity. They’re not making fun now. I managed to integrate myself into the most difficult, challenging place in the world. Even now it’s a stretch, but then it was borderline impossible.’ How did he manage it? Partly because of his tireless toil, partly because of his indefatigable self-belief, but above all because his paintings combined two disparate styles, Minimalism and Expressionism. ‘I bang the paint on and that’s where it lands,’ he explains. ‘I’m articulating as I go along.’ He put the heart and soul back into abstract art.

‘I moved into a loft that was full of old boards – it was a textile warehouse – and I just started chopping them up and making stretchers out of them and covering them with canvas. I even made two paintings where I just painted on the floorboards.’ It wasn’t art school which had prepared him for this, the toughest challenge of his artistic career – it was the dead-end jobs of his late teens and early twenties. ‘I was fucking ready! I was made for that. It’s all in there – unloading the trucks, working on building sites, using a screw gun, I know how to do all these things. All that led to this moment.’ It was those dead-end jobs which made him. ‘I’m so happy I was born poor.’

Despite his Irish roots, his British upbringing and his spectacular success in America, his deepest artistic affinity is arguably with Germany. The German Expressionists, who excited and inspired him as an art student, loom large in his abstract work. ‘I think my work is understood in Germany automatically,’ he says. ‘There’s something dialectical and intellectual in my work that is very engaging to them, besides its sensuality and its physicality.’ There’s darkness in his work, there’s angst, there’s pain, there’s suffering – all the hallmarks of German Expressionism. ‘Of course that’s all in Germany,’ he says. ‘Germany is a country looking for redemption.’ You could say the same of him.

Now in his late seventies, with far more life behind him than ahead of him, he still exudes the restless energy, the joie de vivre, of an artist half his age. Often, when he’s talking, his eyes well up with tears. ‘I’m very unresolved,’ he says. ‘I’ve managed to find a way to survive, to manage the chaos.’ And out of that chaos he has created a cavalcade of beautiful, emotional works of art. ‘I’m doing what I can do – what I know how to do,’ he tells me. ‘I believe in what I’m doing. I believe in the goodness and the rightness of art.’

— William Cook, 2023