William Scott, R.A. 1913-1989

For the best part of fifty years William Scott's sculptural output has been almost entirely overlooked. Until Norbert Lynton's recent volume in which occasional mention of his sculpture is made, almost every commentator on Scott's artistic achievement, has ignored or been ignorant of this important aspect of his oeuvre. The fact that so little remains of Scott's sculpture, that there is no tangible body of work upon which to hang an informed appreciation, not even much photographic evidence, may have proved off-putting. Yet Scott was producing and exhibiting sculpture alongside his paintings well into the 1950s at a time when his reputation both in Britain and overseas was growing at an exponential rate.

William Scott began his artistic career by gaining a place at the Royal Academy sculpture school. Two years later, he was awarded the silver medal for sculpture. Although his predominant interest soon turned to painting, Scott did not abandon sculpture, even after the six-year interval of war. In the early 50s, with his reputation soaring he would exhibit sculpture at a series of prestigious mixed and one-man shows including the ICA's 1955 'New Sculptors and Painter-Sculptors' and the 1956 Hanover Gallery exhibition, intriguingly titled 'William Scott: Painting, Sculpture, Drawings'.

Having experimented with an austere form of abstraction in the early 50s, this second solo show at the Hanover Gallery saw Scott returning to a more figurative mode with the majority of paintings and drawings adopting nude subjects. Following his 1953 trip to America Scott had begun to examine his own artistic identity. He later explained, 'I felt now that there was a Europeanism that I belonged to' and, in interview with Lawrence Alloway in 1954 (for Nine Abstract Artists), he listed  '... primitive sex forms, the sensual and erotic, disconcerting contours, the things of life' as his major interests.

Stimulated by a variety of sources of primitive imagery, as well as the example of European artists such as Debuffet, de Stael and Tapies, Scott returned to the human form with a new objective to 'combine eroticism with a starkness which will be instinctive and uncontrived'. The broad, flat form of Torso with its stick-like neck, small rounded breasts and schematised appendages, recalls closely Scott's large-scale figure paintings of 1954 (see for example fig.1 Red Figure (Red Nude) (private collection)). It also shares marked similarities with the work of Kenneth Armitage at this time, his fellow teaching colleague at Corsham. As Norbert Lynton has noted, 'that WS and Armitage were interested in each other's progress is certain. At some points WS opened paths for Armitage; it also worked the other way around.'  It may have been Armitage who introduced Scott to the flat, yet modelled forms of ancient Cycladic carvings, and to the facility of adopting the flattened plane to achieve area without bulk (see lot 26).

Scott's own investigations into primitive art had led to a similar appreciation of surface. During a 1954 visit to the cave paintings at Lascaux, he had been particularly struck by the way in which variations in the rock surface had been used to enhance the physicality of the figures and animals depicted. With Torso Scott appears to simulate a geological surface texture fashioned by age and scarred by primitive markings while the softly moulded form with its almost 'weather-beaten' contours, evokes a feeling of totemic permanence that is inconceivable in a two-dimensional format.

The catalogue of the 1956 Hanover Gallery exhibition records one of the six sculptures as a large bronze, 36in. high, with the title 'Torso'. It is therefore possible that the present work is a study for this larger piece, the location of which is now unknown. Indeed, with the exception of the present work very few examples of Scott's sculpture can be located with any degree of certainty. As such, the appearance of Torso on the open market provides a unique opportunity to collectors of Scott's work and of British modernist sculpture alike. Its appearance at auction also signals the need for an assessment of Scott's contribution to the latter field, and a reassessment of the role played by sculpture in establishing his reputation as one of the most important artists of his generation.