Word: artful
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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EDWARD HOPPER, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City. A major realist painter, Hopper (1882-1967) is also an enduringly popular chronicler of New England lighthouses, late-night cafes and other American vignettes. Through...
Scully is 44, a pale, knobbly-faced Irishman who was born in Dublin, studied in London and since 1975 has lived in New York City. The show of his work that is currently traveling in Europe (it has already been at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, is now at Munich's Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and will go on to Madrid in September) is not a retrospective. It covers his early maturity, from 1982 to 1988. But Scully has been fixed on the stripe since he was an art student...
...first it was an optical shimmer, a weaving of color energy on the surface, in deference to the prevalent American art theory of the day and, to some degree, in homage to Riley. The work of Mark Rothko, which Scully had seen as a student, was a presiding influence. It had shown him how a neutral and even boring form, an imperfect rectangle, could accumulate reserves of feeling and cogitation -- how the life of the mind and its tentative decisions could be embodied, not just illustrated, in pigment. And there had been a visit to Morocco in 1970; there Scully...
...edges or, in a work like No Neo, 1984, by the slight bulging of stripes against their neighbors, like the entasis of a classical column. (The title means something; Scully wanted his painting to resist the sense of recycling that pervaded the '80s, neo-this and neo-that. "The art that interests me," he says flatly, "is heroic art...
...suggest landscape, though in a distant way. The whites in Pale Fire, 1988, are not flat white but a subtle paste applied over a warm brown ground in rapidly varying touches, so that they have the visual elasticity of flesh. Scully is a conservative, measured colorist. His sense of art, the seemingly obsolete act of communicating by smearing mud on cloth, is anchored in the past. You can see traces of his idols throughout -- especially, in his liking for silvery grays, pinks and a constant regulating black, Velasquez...