{"id":233796,"date":"2026-01-12T06:08:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-12T06:08:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/233796\/"},"modified":"2026-01-12T06:08:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-12T06:08:06","slug":"im-the-product-of-a-smashed-up-family-how-sean-scully-became-the-greatest-abstract-painter-alive-art-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/233796\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I\u2019m the product of a smashed-up family\u2019: how Sean Scully became the greatest abstract painter alive | Art and design"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I ask Sean Scully<\/a> what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it\u2019s music he reaches for. \u201cYou might ask, what\u2019s Miles Davis got over the Beatles? And the answer is: doesn\u2019t have any words in it. And then you could say, what have the Beatles got over John Coltrane? Well, they\u2019ve got words.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear which choice he has made. Scully, who paints rectangles and squares and strips of colour abutting and sliding into each other, is an instrumentalist in paint rather than a pop artist. The meaning of his art is something you feel, not something you can easily describe. He has more in common with Davis and Coltrane than with the Beatles. In addition to improvisational brilliance, his new paintings even colour-match with Coltrane\u2019s classic album Blue Train and Davis\u2019s Kind of Blue. For Scully, the greatest living abstract painter, is playing the blues in Paris. In his current exhibition at the city\u2019s Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery, long, textured blue notes as smoky as a sax at midnight alternate and mingle with black and red and brown in a slow, sad, beautiful music that doesn\u2019t need words, art that doesn\u2019t require images.<\/p>\n

Even now, I am terrified of the dark. I can\u2019t cross a room or get out of my car in the dark<\/p>\n

Those blues have been with Scully since childhood. \u201cI got interested in blue because I had the blues.\u201d He is still driven by pain, he tells me, over green tea in an upper room of the gallery. \u201cEven now I\u2019m terrified of the dark. I can\u2019t walk across a room in the dark and I can\u2019t get out of my car in the dark.\u201d Luckily the gallery is brightly lit \u2013 all white. But the anguish is there in his art, a sense that under an apparently decorous, civilising order \u2013 patterns of rectangles as neat as ploughed fields or windows in a house front \u2013 bubbles up a storm of barely controlled feeling. In his Blue paintings that inner turbulence foams more mightily than ever.<\/p>\n

Born in Dublin in 1945, Scully moved to London as a small child. He is named after his grandfather who hanged himself in military prison in 1916 in Chatham, Kent, while awaiting execution by firing squad \u2013 he had deserted from the British army to try to join the Easter Rising. But Scully doesn\u2019t identify as purely Irish: rather he feels an internal tug-of-war. \u201cI\u2019m Anglo-Irish. And you\u2019ve got this irresolvable, endlessly irresolvable dance between order and abandon that\u2019s all in me all the time and it will be in me until the day I drop dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smoky as a sax at midnight \u2026 Blue, 2024, by Scully. Photograph: Sean Scully<\/p>\n

He has been \u201ctormented\u201d since he was a child in postwar London. \u201cI\u2019m the product of a completely smashed-up family, an Irish family.\u201d His father, too, deserted from the British army, during the second world war, and was imprisoned. By the late 1940s, \u201cmy mum and I were in this slum off the Old Kent Road. On my birth certificate for father\u2019s profession it says \u2018traveller\u2019.\u201d<\/p>\n

His mother\u2019s personality dominated his childhood. \u201cMy mother was really a hurricane. Or a monsoon, perhaps, would be a bit more accurate: she was warm and enveloping but left everything broken. So that would be a good metaphor.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was a conflict between his mother and the nuns who taught him that scarred him. She \u201cgot into a huge fight with them because they said if my father worked on a Sunday, the devil would move in under my bed\u201d.<\/p>\n

At the age of seven Scully was taken away from the scary nuns, but also from the ceremony and ritual beauty of Catholicism. \u201cAnd so I had a kind of nervous breakdown. I went to the state school and I think that is when I became an artist. That incredible rupture. I asked my mother could I have an altar at home and she said no. So I lost my religion, and I\u2019ve never been able to put it back together again. I\u2019ve tried to put it back together with art.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Abstract works go bang, straight inside\u2019 \u2026 Backs and Fronts 1981. Photograph: \u00a9 Sean Scully. Courtesy of the Artist<\/p>\n

Scully trained in England as a figurative artist, supporting himself with manual jobs, then in 1975 moved to New York, where postwar art took a walk on the abstract side. When he arrived, the last abstract expressionists were battling it out with the minimalists. But for him the American avant garde had lost all feeling. \u201cThey got emptied out. They made art big and emblematic but also empty.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like who?<\/p>\n

\u201cNewman,\u201d he says, referring to the abstract expressionist painter and sculptor Barnett Newman, who created fields of pure colour and vast space divided by vertical lines that have been interpreted as divine lightning: he vaunted the quasi-religious vocation of abstract art in his painting cycle Stations of the Cross. For Scully this was pure pomposity. He is even sceptical about that abstract expressionist holy of holies, the Rothko Chapel in Houston: \u201cI found it extraordinarily underwhelming.\u201d I bristle a bit because I love Rothko.<\/p>\n

Despite his misgivings, Scully was and is an heir of these artists. He is attracted to the \u201creligious, romantic\u201d side of America that gave birth to their sublime art. In the 1970s and 80s, he found a way to infuse that romantic spirituality into paintings that at first glance looked like the regular, uninflected patterns and arrangements with which the minimalist movement sought to cool out their grand elders. He\u2019s still moving shapes about with minimalist simplicity but with unmistakable inner passion. In his Blue paintings, he says, \u201cI try to make abutments and unions and relationships that are difficult, strange, tender, poetic, that reflect all the ways that bodies can come together, that bodies can share something, just like we have to share this planet. I think about all this stuff when I\u2019m making my paintings and that\u2019s kind of what they stand for.\u201d The scale of his paintings also matters hugely, or rather not hugely. \u201cThe fact that they\u2019re so small I think makes them vulnerable in some way. And their intimacy is very, very strong. They\u2019re not heroic.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, he is still searching for the faith he lost as a child, and is deeply drawn to the spiritual dimension in art that made Rothko want to put his paintings in a chapel: \u201cAbstract painting goes straight into your soul. So I think it has to believe in some kind of spiritual power. I mean, that\u2019s its function, because it\u2019s pre-verbal, isn\u2019t it? It goes bang, straight inside.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018I love to go there and mess around\u2019 \u2026 the artist in his studio. Photograph: Richard Beaven\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

As he speaks I can see his paintings downstairs, rivulets and ridges of blue and black and tear-pools of paint that do speak directly to the soul. But I wonder whether it\u2019s the \u201cEnglish\u201d side of his Anglo-Irish identity that has enabled him to renew abstract art. His paintings have a meat-and-potatoes English empiricism, a digging down into real feelings.<\/p>\n

And Scully really has been shattered. In 1983 his first son, Paul, died in a car accident aged 18. \u201cThose things, they just feed on themselves.\u201d He \u201cwent off the rails\u201d with grief. \u201cI have a lot of sadness in me, but I love painting. I love it. I\u2019m so happy in my studio. I go there every day. I love to go there and mess around or prepare something, you know, do something. But when I paint, I paint very, very direct.\u201d<\/p>\n

He has flown to Paris today from Dublin where he has just opened a show and has another coming up in London. Scully is devoted to family life and dotes on his teenage son Oisin. Not long ago they moved to London for the schools. Now they\u2019re back in New York because Oisin \u201cdetested\u201d London. And they\u2019re attending a Catholic church, because even though Scully cannot recover his faith, his son has become interested in religion. In his garden, he has a replica of the bridge from Monet\u2019s garden and beyond it statues of Buddha and an angel. He likes to tease visitors by saying: \u201cYou can\u2019t speak loudly because there\u2019s an angel,\u201d as if he believes there\u2019s a real one out there.<\/p>\n

Abstract painting is still divisive: random squares, dollops of colour are all very well but aren\u2019t they just pretty patterns like wallpaper? Today, a lot of what passes for abstract art is as vacant as dots on wrapping paper. But truly powerful abstract painting, like Scully\u2019s, has a sense of necessity and inevitability: it must be this way. It expresses mysteries that can\u2019t be put in any other form.<\/p>\n

In spite of his scepticism about Mark Rothko\u2019s chapel, Scully is the only abstract painter around today I would dream of comparing to the Russia-born, Jewish American genius. In the Blue paintings you sense a Rothko-esque mystery and intensity.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you listen to Nessun Dorma,\u201d he says, again reaching for music as an analogy, \u201cit makes you cry \u2013 but you don\u2019t know what the words are. That\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to do. I\u2019m trying to break people\u2019s hearts. I want to make abstraction popular without lowering the bar.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sean Scully, Blue is at Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris<\/a>, until 17 January<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When I ask Sean Scully what an abstract painting has over a figurative one it\u2019s music he reaches…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233797,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[437,434,435,436,438,146,85,46],"class_list":{"0":"post-233796","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-il","15":"tag-israel"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233796","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233796"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233796\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233796"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233796"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233796"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}