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Lot Essay
Painted in 1958, Table with Still Life, No. 2 was begun shortly after William Scott's return from the Venice Biennale, where he had represented Britain at the height of his international reputation.
The composition distils the pared-back language of Scott's mature still lifes to its essentials. A broad tabletop of warm umber tilts across the canvas against a pale ground, its edges pressing towards the borders of the picture. Set into it, in a loose and unhurried rhythm, are rectangles of black, grey and white; some soft and smoky, others dense and chalky, each suggesting a pot, a pan or a dish, and yet without insisting on it. Scott flattens the pictorial space almost entirely, so that the table becomes less a piece of furniture than a field of colour, and the objects on it are held in balance by weight and tone rather than by perspective.
Scott spoke plainly of the role these objects played in his art. Of the saucepans and kitchen utensils that recur throughout his still lifes, he remarked that they are ‘completely uninteresting’. Importantly this is precisely why he painted them: they are ‘the means to making a picture’ (W. Scott, quoted in L. Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, London, 1954, p. 37). Such indifference to the objects themselves explains the freedom of the present work. Released from the obligation to describe, the objects become pure elements, and the painting relies for its power on proportion: the tension between a dark rectangle and a pale one; the gradual shift from black to grey; the weight of the table pressing against the space around it.
That the picture found an international audience almost immediately is clear from its early history. It was listed on an invoice from the Hanover Gallery, Scott's London dealer, to the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York on 15 January 1959, and shown there that spring in William Scott: Recent Paintings. It travelled to Toronto the following year for 4 Internationals: Appel, Scott, Hepworth, Tàpies at Gallery Moos, and remained in the gallery stock until 1985, when it was presented to the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, by Martha Jackson's son, David Anderson.
In 1955, Scott had described his aim as ‘to combine a sensual eroticism with a starkness, which will be instinctive and uncontrived’ (W. Scott, quoted in A. Bowness, William Scott: Paintings, London, 1964, p. 35). Three years later, the present work appears to realise that aim: the starkness of its black and white forms tempered by the softness of the surface around them.
The composition distils the pared-back language of Scott's mature still lifes to its essentials. A broad tabletop of warm umber tilts across the canvas against a pale ground, its edges pressing towards the borders of the picture. Set into it, in a loose and unhurried rhythm, are rectangles of black, grey and white; some soft and smoky, others dense and chalky, each suggesting a pot, a pan or a dish, and yet without insisting on it. Scott flattens the pictorial space almost entirely, so that the table becomes less a piece of furniture than a field of colour, and the objects on it are held in balance by weight and tone rather than by perspective.
Scott spoke plainly of the role these objects played in his art. Of the saucepans and kitchen utensils that recur throughout his still lifes, he remarked that they are ‘completely uninteresting’. Importantly this is precisely why he painted them: they are ‘the means to making a picture’ (W. Scott, quoted in L. Alloway, Nine Abstract Artists, London, 1954, p. 37). Such indifference to the objects themselves explains the freedom of the present work. Released from the obligation to describe, the objects become pure elements, and the painting relies for its power on proportion: the tension between a dark rectangle and a pale one; the gradual shift from black to grey; the weight of the table pressing against the space around it.
That the picture found an international audience almost immediately is clear from its early history. It was listed on an invoice from the Hanover Gallery, Scott's London dealer, to the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York on 15 January 1959, and shown there that spring in William Scott: Recent Paintings. It travelled to Toronto the following year for 4 Internationals: Appel, Scott, Hepworth, Tàpies at Gallery Moos, and remained in the gallery stock until 1985, when it was presented to the Phoenix Art Museum, Arizona, by Martha Jackson's son, David Anderson.
In 1955, Scott had described his aim as ‘to combine a sensual eroticism with a starkness, which will be instinctive and uncontrived’ (W. Scott, quoted in A. Bowness, William Scott: Paintings, London, 1964, p. 35). Three years later, the present work appears to realise that aim: the starkness of its black and white forms tempered by the softness of the surface around them.