WILLIAM Scott was undoubtedly one of the three or four best Irish painters since the second World War (he had, of course, been painting well before it too). This exhibition contains nine pictures in the main gallery, plus a few more canvases, some gouaches and charcoal drawings in the office below. As such, it gives a kind of overall view of Scott in minimo and charts his progress over decades.
He evolved from a fairly standard, yet personalised, Picasso-Braque idiom into abstraction, via still life themes which he gradually refined until the shapes lost all their realist references.
He also introduced a sense of forms floating in space, instead of resting on a ground, and as he grew more and more interested in formal relationships per se, he developed his colour sense correspondingly.
The earlier work has a certain black-and-white bias, typical of the St Ives painters with whom Scott was closely associated. How rich and deep his palette became later is evidenced in the Abstract of 1966, a genuine masterpiece.
The Bowl with Three Pears of 1976 might seem almost a backward step, but again the motifs are little more than abstract shapes in space. From there it was an obvious step to the virtually Minimalist paintings of his late years, and in certain large works he seems to be taking on the New York School - including Rothko and Newman - at their own game. (With dubious success, it seems to me; with all Scott's many and self-evident qualities, he lacked the heroic quality which they possessed by birthright).
There is also a Reclining Nude - Orange Pillow drawn with the mock-naive quality which was a product of deep sophistication and shows that Scott never really abandoned figurativism.
Some of the gouaches are superb and the charcoal drawings (rather close to Roger Hilton) show again the austere simplicity with which he could say, or suggest, a great deal. He was always a splendid, resourceful craftsman, for whom paint was a natural, personal language of expression.