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Lot Essay
‘The rhythm of music and the rhythm in my work are really one and the same. My work is inhabited by the rhythm’ (Sean Scully)
A euphony of line and colour, Music is a consummate early example of Sean Scully’s emotionally charged abstraction. Executed in New York in 1986, it dates to a breakthrough decade during which Scully redefined abstract painting against the prevailing strictures of hard-edged Minimalism. The work is comprised of three canvases, which interlock like harmonies in a score. Bands of sky blue and blush pink illuminate the left-most, rectangular panel, while thick horizontal bands of jet black and bright yellow umber extend across the larger C-shaped canvas that adjoins it. Inset into the latter is a small canvas bearing diagonal bands of navy and brick red. The latter part of the 1980s saw a steady rise in acclaim for Scully, culminating in his first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe, as well as the first of two Turner Prize nominations. An important work from this pivotal period, Music was originally part of the celebrated Oliver-Hoffmann Collection, where it remained for fourteen years. It was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago between 1988 and 1989, and has since been featured in a number of solo exhibitions including Scully’s retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2012.
Music pays tribute to an early and important point of reference in Scully’s body of work. He locates the significance of music in his Irish heritage, and recollects a childhood with the musical accompaniment of his grandmother, father and mother: ‘when you play music in Ireland ... you see the whole room start to move. The rhythm of that music is in the people’ (S. Scully quoted in B. Kennedy, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat. Hood Museum of Art, Hanover 2008, p. 41). Music was particularly on his mind across the 1980s, with his defining early masterwork Backs and Fronts (1981) originally titled Four Musicians, in homage to Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921). In the present work, paint moves in layered and syncopated rhythm across the surface of the canvas, the steady, metronome motion of horizontals and verticals contrasting with the inset’s diagonals. As Scully described it, ‘you’ve got this very feminine sky blue with pink that seems light and airy, big horizontals working up against that. Then there’s this very strangely painted diagonal. I find the painting to be constantly turning. It’s an uplifting painting ... it’s not in any way loaded with melancholia, as so many of my paintings are’ (S. Scully quoted in ibid., p. 42).
Scully suggests that Music has ‘an open kind of beauty’ (S. Scully quoted in Sean Scully: Retrospective, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern 2012, p. 76). Integral to this ‘openness’ is the inclusion of the diagonal line, a notable feature of Scully’s work across the 1980s. Scully has explained that he uses diagonals ‘as symbolic and psychological’ (S. Scully quoted in B. Kennedy, ibid., p. 76). He included a similar inset in For Charles Choset (1988), a painting dedicated to the composer and close friend of the artist shortly after his death from AIDS-related complications, in which the diagonal becomes elegiac and ascendant.
In the present work, preceded by the melody of the pink and blue verticals and the caesura-like twin black and yellow blocks, the diagonal inset infuses the canvas with an expressive moment of impact, like a dynamic shift in a musical score. Towards the end of the 1980s Scully visited Mexico and was entranced by its solid vernacular architecture. Much of his oeuvre from that point onward would refer closely to edges, to the rigour of architectural form and earthly horizons. In contrast, through soaring line which seems to extend ad infinitum beyond the canvas edge, Music reaches for the celestial and intangible.
A euphony of line and colour, Music is a consummate early example of Sean Scully’s emotionally charged abstraction. Executed in New York in 1986, it dates to a breakthrough decade during which Scully redefined abstract painting against the prevailing strictures of hard-edged Minimalism. The work is comprised of three canvases, which interlock like harmonies in a score. Bands of sky blue and blush pink illuminate the left-most, rectangular panel, while thick horizontal bands of jet black and bright yellow umber extend across the larger C-shaped canvas that adjoins it. Inset into the latter is a small canvas bearing diagonal bands of navy and brick red. The latter part of the 1980s saw a steady rise in acclaim for Scully, culminating in his first major institutional solo exhibition in Europe, as well as the first of two Turner Prize nominations. An important work from this pivotal period, Music was originally part of the celebrated Oliver-Hoffmann Collection, where it remained for fourteen years. It was shown at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago between 1988 and 1989, and has since been featured in a number of solo exhibitions including Scully’s retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern in 2012.
Music pays tribute to an early and important point of reference in Scully’s body of work. He locates the significance of music in his Irish heritage, and recollects a childhood with the musical accompaniment of his grandmother, father and mother: ‘when you play music in Ireland ... you see the whole room start to move. The rhythm of that music is in the people’ (S. Scully quoted in B. Kennedy, Sean Scully: The Art of the Stripe, exh. cat. Hood Museum of Art, Hanover 2008, p. 41). Music was particularly on his mind across the 1980s, with his defining early masterwork Backs and Fronts (1981) originally titled Four Musicians, in homage to Picasso’s Three Musicians (1921). In the present work, paint moves in layered and syncopated rhythm across the surface of the canvas, the steady, metronome motion of horizontals and verticals contrasting with the inset’s diagonals. As Scully described it, ‘you’ve got this very feminine sky blue with pink that seems light and airy, big horizontals working up against that. Then there’s this very strangely painted diagonal. I find the painting to be constantly turning. It’s an uplifting painting ... it’s not in any way loaded with melancholia, as so many of my paintings are’ (S. Scully quoted in ibid., p. 42).
Scully suggests that Music has ‘an open kind of beauty’ (S. Scully quoted in Sean Scully: Retrospective, exh. cat. Kunstmuseum Bern, Bern 2012, p. 76). Integral to this ‘openness’ is the inclusion of the diagonal line, a notable feature of Scully’s work across the 1980s. Scully has explained that he uses diagonals ‘as symbolic and psychological’ (S. Scully quoted in B. Kennedy, ibid., p. 76). He included a similar inset in For Charles Choset (1988), a painting dedicated to the composer and close friend of the artist shortly after his death from AIDS-related complications, in which the diagonal becomes elegiac and ascendant.
In the present work, preceded by the melody of the pink and blue verticals and the caesura-like twin black and yellow blocks, the diagonal inset infuses the canvas with an expressive moment of impact, like a dynamic shift in a musical score. Towards the end of the 1980s Scully visited Mexico and was entranced by its solid vernacular architecture. Much of his oeuvre from that point onward would refer closely to edges, to the rigour of architectural form and earthly horizons. In contrast, through soaring line which seems to extend ad infinitum beyond the canvas edge, Music reaches for the celestial and intangible.