Adam's Important Irish Art September 26th 2018

102 90 WILLIAM SCOTT OBE RA (1913-1989) Nude (1956) Charcoal on paper, 48 x 64cm (19 x 25¼’’) Signed and dated (19)’56 Provenance: With On the Wall Gallery, Belfast, where purchased by current owner. Exhibited: Belfast, Ulster Museum; Dublin, Guinness Hopstore; Edinburgh, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; ‘William Scott Retrospective 1986, Catalogue No.80, lent by the artist. William Scott was born in Greenock, Scotland, but moved to Enniskillen with his family at the age of 11. His formal art training began at the Belfast College of Art and later won a scholarship to study at the Royal Academy Schools in London where he took classes in both painting and sculpture. From the mid-1930s, Scott moved numerous times, living in Cornwall, Italy, the South of France and Pont Aven. When World War II broke out he returned to the UK and joined the army, working at the lithography and map-making section of the Royal Engineers in North Wales. His output stayed consistent after the war and after visiting New York where he met Martha Jackson, she held six solo shows for Scott and introduced him to painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Franz Klein. The present work dates to 1956, a period when the artist was exploring the nude in various mediums including a series done with charcoal on paper. In Nude , Scott has reduced the form of the woman to a series of simple, thick black lines, compressing the form within the parameters of the page and consequently eliminating the head with the exception of the model’s chin. Norbert Lynton in his 2004 monograph William Scott quotes the artist: ‘for me, the first act in making a drawing is looking at the space I am going to work upon; and my primary object will be to relate the image to the edge of that space’. Hilton Kramer, in his review of Scott’s exhibition of the 1950s’ period drawings at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York noted that the figure, for Scott, is in effect ‘reinvent- ed’ to conform to the shape of the space it occupies on the sheet of paper. A certain eroticism is wedded to a tough-minded aestheticism’. The artist himself lent the present work to his 1986 Retrospective at the Ulster Museum, which also toured Dub- lin and Edinburgh. He also exhibited at the Irish Exhibition of Living Art, ROSC ’80 and represented Britain at the 1958 Venice Biennale. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Whitechapel, Tate Britain, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Ulster Museum, Kunsthalle Berne and the F.E. McWilliam Gallery & Studio, Banbridge. € 15,000 - 20,000