SEAN SCULLY: A feminine macho
Timo Vuorikoski

	fig.1 Frank Stella Die Fahne Hoch! 1959 enamel on canvas 308.61 x 185.42 cm Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Gift of Mr and Mrs Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase, with funds from the John IH Baur Purchase Fund; the Charles and Anita Blatt Fund; Peter M. Brant; BH Friedman; the Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Susan Morse Hilles; The Lauder Foundation; Frances and Sydney Lewis; the Albert A. List Fund; Philip Morris Incorporated; Sandra Payson; Mr and Mrs Albrecht Saalfield; Mrs Percy Uris; Warner Communications Inc. and the National Endowment for the Arts, 75.22 © Frank Stella, 1959/ARS. Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia

Where there is an obvious and visible similarity between two paintings, it seems logical to think that the earlier work has influenced the later one. It could also be possible that both share an even older point of departure, or one existing at a more common level.

Sean Scully has described his own starting points in a very open manner. Interviewed by Ned Rifkin in May 1994, he said: ‘I think if you have Mondrian, if you have Matisse, Mondrian, Rothko, then you’ve got my work. Those are the three — there are others’.¹ There are many others, even to the extent that some American critics have seen features of conservatism, weakness and anachronism in Scully’s civilised, positive and open emotional relationship with art history in the European manner. They have naturally also felt concern over the fact that the painterly values of Modernism are not dying out after all.

In the Rifkin interview there is another, perhaps enigmatic, reference to the artist’s relationship to Frank Stella. In this comment, Scully first criticises the formalist solutions of colour field painting, going on to note that as an orientation, Post-Minimalism is more interesting than formalism, because it first helped to break down the legacy of Abstract Expressionism and then permitted the reconstruction of the painting. Asking who these Post-Minimalists were that Scully was referring to, Rifkin received the following reply: ‘Agnes Martin, who is a very important artist (and she’s important to all of them), and, of course, Frank Stella’s black paintings, which are very important.’ Rifkin wanted to be sure and asked: ‘They’re very important to you?’ Scully confirmed this point, saying: ‘They’re very important to me because they showed me a way of achieving a kind of emotional power, even though he would probably deny that.’²

In 1985 John Caldwell had pointed to the similarity between Sean Scully’s works and Frank Stella’s paintings from 1958 to 1960. (See, for an example, Die Fahne Hoch! 1959, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, fig.1) Though not speaking of any direct influence, he analyses the differences in the intentions and techniques of the artists. Caldwell sees Stella’s and Scully’s respective courses of stylistic evolution as if they were tangential to each other and yet coming from opposite directions. Stella evolved in a minimalist and anti-materialist direction, while Scully took the opposite course, away from the asceticism of his earlier black paintings towards emotion, space, colour and physicality.³

fig.2 Sean Scully 81#6 1981 charcoal and chalk on paper 77.5 x 59.7 cm collection of the artist

Scully’s own homage to Stella underscores the influential emotional power of the Post-Minimalism represented by the latter, seeing Stella, as it were, in a different light to formalist critics of the 1960s. This new interpretation of Stella was also provided by Christian Geelhaar in 1980, when as the result of his extensive studies of Stella’s working drawings he ended up emphasising the importance of a multi-layered range of content and emotion.⁴ According to him, Stella’s drawings express what had already been claimed by William Rubin in 1970: ‘He [Stella] is not in the historical line of geometrical painting at all.’⁵ Geelhaar was even ready to state that had Stella’s drawings been known previously, many of the misconceptions about his work could have been avoided.

In view of this background it is interesting to see how in their expression and language of form, Scully’s charcoal and chalk drawings from 1981 (for example 81#6 1981, collection of the artist, fig.2) particularly resemble Stella’s early painterly drawings with their strongly laden nature. In corresponding terms, one would like to say that in his paintings from 1958–60 Stella was considerably more expressive and ‘naturalistic’ than Scully has ever been as a painter.

	fig.3 Sean Scully in his studio

Sean Scully’s post-1982 paintings and Frank Stella’s works from 1958–60 also have an interesting connection in terms of content or interpretation, which needs to be considered in the present brief analysis of Scully’s points of departure.

Scully has referred, in various connections, to how naturally sexuality is associated with his works and his painting. In the Rifkin interview, he noted:

When you paint, it’s got a lot to do with your sexuality, your identity. It certainly does in my case. And when the shape does not provide direction, then the sensuality has to provide its own direction, so it becomes disconnected from the shape, so the possibility for expression and interpretation in the way that the shape is painted becomes, in fact, more act.⁶

In the same interview, he said: ‘You know what yellow is? That’s the colour of madness. Quite perfect for me. And it’s also the colour of sex — I am curious, yellow. It was because yellow was supposed to be the barometer of sex. So maybe sex and madness are somehow related.’⁷

The titles of Scully’s works do not contain references to sexuality. On the other hand, Stella’s drawings and paintings from 1958–60 have very explicit titles. Both Geelhaar and Robert Rosenblum discuss the relationship of Stella’s works with Robert Motherwell’s Je t’aime series of paintings from 1955–57.⁸ Rosenblum comments that where Motherwell presented his declarations of love in traditional terms, Stella appears to have sought to annoy Motherwell in a schoolboy vein by naming his drawings and paintings according to the graffiti of New York’s lower east side, where he lived (Fuck you, Mary Lou’s cunt is blue, Your lips are blue).⁹ At the time, Stella was a young art student of twenty-two who had just moved to New York, which partly explains the bluster and the language. In 1981–82, when Scully struggled with the same visual–formalistic–emotional process of change, he was a thirty-six-year-old artist with a long and impressive career, for whom sexuality was an intense storm of madness regulating the act of creation and the psyche, and not just a puerile jest. But the intensity was a shared feature. And before long a Matissean sublimity, too. Therefore, Scully could sincerely give recognition to Stella for showing him ‘a way of achieving a kind of emotional power’.¹⁰

Ever since Matisse’s Porte-fenêtre à Collioure 1914 (Musée national d’Art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris) was first shown to the public at an exhibition in Los Angeles in 1966, followed by exhibitions in Chicago and Boston, it has had a strong influence on American Minimalism. Porte-fenêtre consists of stripes, but stripedness was no less present in other paintings by Matisse, by no means least in The bathers by a river 1909, 1913 and 1916 (Art Institute of Chicago). And the same stripes were already present in Edouard Manet’s The balcony 1868–69 (Musee d’Orsay, Paris). We can also assume that Porte-fenêtre is specifically an abstract work. On the other hand, abstraction is a very relative concept in the case of Scully.

Technically, Matisse’s Porte-fenêtre is an unfinished and unsigned ‘over-painting’. Painting was a painfully complex process for Matisse, entailing the repeated painting-over of a single work, the scratching away of surface, and repainting. He described these struggles in letters to his friends. Matisse wanted to hide the ‘marks of the tongs’ from the viewer in the final version of the work, but he was only partly successful in doing so. The painstaking nature of the work, however, creates the special stylistic character of Matisse’s paintings — their charm and quiet patina, the expectation of the moment of inspiration, passion suppressed with its point blunted and buried under a new layer of paint, the unfinished nature of the work and the mark of the process. Scully also admired the feminine dimension in Matisse, as he remarked when interviewed by Victoria Combalia in June 1994: ‘They (Matisse and Rothko) had a more feminine energy than Picasso, in the sense that they had the ability in their paintings to have things not be finally, emphatically, concluded.’¹¹

The mark of an unfinished process is present in Scully’s own paintings. It distinguishes the European-feminine Matisse-Scully from the American-masculine Picasso-Stella. Scully goes on to note: ‘I am talking about feminine energy that can be in men too. It seems to me that a masculine energy is more about force, power, and energy; it has the power of certainty but it also has the stupidity of certainty … the mystery of the uncertainty, of ambivalence, of things not being quite nailed down, is what is so deeply moving and human to me in Rothko and Matisse.’

Translated from Finnish by Jyri Kokkonen
All notes by editor

¹ Sean Scully, interview with Ned Rifkin, in Ned Rifkin (ed.) Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976–1995 London: Thames & Hudson 1995 pp.57–80 (p.69).
² Scully, interview with Rifkin 1995 p.58.
³ John Caldwell ‘The new paintings’ Sean Scully (exhibition catalogue) Pittsburgh: Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute 1985 pp.17–21.
⁴ Christian Geelhaar Frank Stella: Working drawings/zeichnungen, 1956–1970 Basel: Kunstmuseum 1980.
⁵ William S Rubin Frank Stella New York: Museum of Modern Art 1970 p.25.
⁶ Scully, interview with Rifkin 1995 p.75.
⁷ Scully, interview with Rifkin 1995 p.64.
⁸ Robert Rosenblum, introduction to William S Rubin Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965: a catalogue raisonné New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang 1986 pp.10–23 (p.16); Robert Motherwell Je t’aime 2 1955 oil on canvas, private collection; Robert Motherwell Je t’aime 2A 1955 oil on canvas, private collection; Robert Motherwell Je t’aime 4 1955–57 oil on canvas, private collection, etc.
⁹ Frank Stella Your lips are blue 1958 oil on canvas, private collection; see also Frank Stella Mary Lou loves Frank 1958 oil on canvas, private collection.
¹⁰ Scully, interview with Rifkin 1995 p.58.
¹¹ Sean Scully, cited in Victoria Combalia ‘Sean Scully: against  formalism’ in Rivkin (ed) Sean Scully: Twenty years 1976–1995 1995 pp.31–46 (p.88).