William Scott 1913-1989
Black Pan on Grey, 1975
gouache
52.5 x 76.8 cm
20 5/8 x 30 1/4 in
20 5/8 x 30 1/4 in
‘If the guitar was to Braque his Madonna, the frying pan could be my guitar’, Scott said in the late 1940s of his favoured motif. Repeated numerous times, the frying...
‘If the guitar was to Braque his Madonna, the frying pan could be my guitar’, Scott said in the late 1940s of his favoured motif. Repeated numerous times, the frying pan can be seen in his work, transformed and altered according to his personal artistic concerns at the given time. Minimalist forms and radical simplicity characterises his work throughout the 1970s, following a period of greater abstraction in the decade before. Painted in the year that Scott fixated on works on paper, his typical subject matter reduced to its most basic form, using flattened perspective which leads the viewer to question where the pan exists in space. Earlier still lifes had been delineated with the boundary of the table edge offering a clue as to the limits of those domestic spaces. Here we are offered no such hint, with the exception of the blue and white striped area, perhaps a tea towel and an object just out a view. This drastic composition along with Scott’s obvious disregard for the function of the subject matter, makes the work feel like an offer to contemplate the formal qualities of the painting itself.
Provenance
The Artist and thence by descent