Sean Scully
78 Fall 2004
New Perspective
Mystery in art is very important to me. I feel that a lot of that is being squeezed out of art
in today’s mechanized, digitized world. A number of the twentieth-century artists I most
admire—artists like Barnett Newman, Giorgio Morandi, and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner—
created mythologies in order to keep mystery at the core of their work and to fight off
a sense that they were becoming disconnected from the natural world.
By mythology, I don’t mean art that refers to Greek and Roman gods. For me, the
mythic involves the idea of legend and mystery and something you can’t trace all the
way back; you can’t just unravel it or decode it. It may be something that is at least partly
comprehensible to a broader audience or something more specific and autobiographical—
what I am calling personal mythology—which can be hidden from all but a select few.
In a democracy, where everybody becomes or is able to become their own world, people
sometimes capriciously establish their own idea of myth and—in a rather extended relationship
with Marcel Duchamp—declare that certain things are special just because
they say so. That can close off meaning, however, and in this essay I present some of my
concerns and thoughts about it. The essay is a kind of argument with myself about the
function and the importance of modern myth.
Recently I gave a lecture on this topic, and I began with Barnett Newman’s Zim Zum I
(fig. 1). He made two versions of this large steel sculpture, which creates a corridor for
the viewer to walk through. Zim zum in Hebrew can mean a number of different things,
but one of them is “sacred space,” and that is the way I interpret Newman’s titling of the
work. Newman is trying here, as on many other occasions, to create his own mythology—
that he is a great religious artist, or quasi-religious artist, one who compares himself rather
charmingly with Michelangelo. Thus he presents Zim Zum not as a mere arrangement of
minimal shapes but as the cradle of a special and mystical place.
Newman tried to make a space that was spiritually charged, and that is what I try to
do in my work too. I basically believe the world is filled with spiritual energy and I’m
very involved with things that attract it. Of course it cannot be proven that Zim Zum is
a “special” place, but Newman asked us to suspend our disbelief and cooperate with his
reference, with his act of creation and designation.
The zigzagging steel planes might be compared to the design of an African mask, the
kind that inspired Pablo Picasso and other modernists in the early twentieth century who
turned to the “primitive” for inspiration. But the mask (fig. 2) usually does not attempt
to tell stories like Newman did. Take, for example, a Songye mask made of wood and
On Mythology, Abstraction, and Mystery
Volume 18, Number 3 © 2004 Smithsonian Institution
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79 American Art
Sean Scully, Precious, 1987. Oil,
72 x 72 in. Private collection
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straw that I saw recently in a museum. Its point is to gain the maximum in expression
with almost no consideration for the appearance of things. It goes back and forth with
tremendous force between the rhythmic, stylized linearity of the drawing, which both
expresses and does not express the appearance of a head—though it does express life and
the continuing rhythm of life and death—and the straw. It embodies in its constant
fluctuation between the straw material and the deeply stylized rhythm of the drawing the
belief of the people it was made for and by. It was made to summon the gods, and the
people who used it and viewed it knew this about its play of realism and nonrealism. I’m
not really a collector, but I used to have a Dogon mask I kept at my house in New York,
which had a repeated vertical rhythm; it’s supposed to be a bird yet it looks nothing like
a bird. Its maker understood that you don’t make a representation of a spirit, you make
80 Fall 2004
1 Barnett Newman, Zim Zum I,
1969. Cor-ten steel, 96 x 72 ½ x
180 in. San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art, Purchased through a
gift from Phyllis Wattis © Barnett
Newman Foundation/Artists
Rights Society (ARS), New York
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something that a spirit would be
attracted to inhabit. That was the
idea of the African masks. Instead
of conjuring up the spirits, they
assume the spirits are already there,
the way the flower and the bee
work. I “used” this mask for a long
time myself. It made the point that
this is not mere space or geometry.
In the same way when one hears
jazz today the original structure
of a song played by John Coltrane
is constantly lost and found and
brought repeatedly to the edge of
emotional crisis. That’s what is
happening with the mask too. It is
made to attract the gods, to get the
gods to somehow inhabit it.
Barnett Newman was extremely
interested in attaching himself to
great themes. He painted, for example,
Onement (part of a series begun
in 1948) as if it would be the one
moment, the beginning, the origin.
He wanted to get to something that
was fundamental and pure, to sweep
aside that confusing, polluting,
compromising, and dialectical
European shadow and make a pure
American art, a new beginning, and that’s what his paintings constantly try to present.
Newman also painted The Stations of the Cross (1958–64), the tragic story of Jesus being
tried, taken out to Calvary, and executed. He painted this in black and white stripes as if
they could express this story. He has attached himself to this story. He wanted to create
his own mythology and to do it with stripes. But in many ways he created an art that is
for experts and for devotees. In order for a myth to take root, to have power, it must have
more than one devotee. There is a schism between what an artist like Newman says and
what is self-evident, going obliquely back to Duchamp. For example, I could stand on a
stage, drink a glass of water, and then declare that I have just made an artwork through
my performance. We have a crisis of what artists say and what they can support. I have it
myself; I live with it on a daily basis.
Works become mythic in other ways. Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1918) in
Targu-Jiu, Romania, for example, is not endless but we are asked to believe in a sense that
it doesn’t end, that its spirit or idea is bigger than its physical form. Alberto Giacometti’s
Tall Figure (1949) is a figure ravaged, which stands mute and dignified; it too has in it a
sense of myth, something that one can only feel, not see. Giorgio Morandi painted jars
and jugs in endless silent conversations on a modest scale, and they also fit into the category
of images that become mythic because they are not explainable, images that like
Giacometti’s figure stand silent and reverential. A Morandi painting becomes a vessel for
meaning, a vessel for feeling. In American Indian culture they have people who are called
“contrary”—they are the ones who do everything backward. Giorgio Morandi was also a
81 American Art
2 Songye mask, Democratic
Republic of Congo, 1910–30.
Hardwood with traces of black,
red, white, and ocher paint, and
fibers, 24 ¾ in. high © ABM
Archives Barbier-Mueller, Geneva,
Switzerland
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contrary. He painted too small with not enough colors and wouldn’t do exhibitions; he
found exhibitions to be an intrusion on his private time. Can you imagine that?
There are, of course, many myths of the land, including myths of the Native Americans.
Recently I have been teaching and working in Germany, and I feel the power of the
German landscape. The land in Germany gave rise to the movement that we call
romanticism, which flowered in England in a similarly opulent green landscape. In
nearly all countries the land, nature, is referred to as Mother. That in itself is mythic,
the mythic mother, the one we walk over and through and unfortunately build upon.
But in Germany it is the Fatherland, something that strikes me as rather distinct.
I have been working in the countryside, and the first painting I made in my farm
studio there was green, a healing and regenerative color. At the beginning of the twentieth
century, the German expressionists like Kirchner felt an incredible need to reconnect with
the solace of nature. World War I was on its way, riding toward us like a dark horse, and
the artists were reacting to this. Kirchner’s Four Bathers (fig. 3) comes to us with the life
force of nature. His figures are flat and there is a beautiful, humble sense of material in
the German expressionist paintings; they used very simple canvas and dry paint because
they wanted to be with nature, not to make something separate. There are countless paintings
of people in the lakes in Bavaria, which have a magical, mystical, mythic importance
for the people, and the link between the people and their landscape is profound. Even
now you can find people doing the same things the people are doing in that painting,
communing with other human beings and with nature. Kirchner’s blue is vital, a blue
you would see only in your dreams. The painting is horizontal, ambitious, open, and
hopeful. Above all, the water flows through the composition, giving it energy, mystical
power, and movement. The painting is a section of the bigger idyllic world. It is an
extremely optimistic, emotionally expansive painting, where we as human beings immerse
ourselves in the forgiving water of nature.
82 Fall 2004
3 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Four
Bathers, 1910. Oil, 29 ½ x 39 ⅝ in.
Von der Heydt-Museum, Wuppertal,
Germany
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You know, a lot of people think these German expressionist paintings are all the same,
but the personalities who painted them were different. Otto Mueller’s compositions tend
to be vertical, less open, more contained than Kirchner’s. His color is extremely delicate
and melancholic, the color of memory, and you might compare it with Morandi or
Agnes Martin later on. He is not illustrating optimism, but only a hope, a faint dream.
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff painted uncompromising pictures that release the force of nature
through direct, primary color. And Emil Nolde was attracted to notions of purity. Unfortunately,
he sought the approval of the Nazis, or couldn’t understand why they didn’t
like his work—a testament to our power of self-delusion. So he went to the South Seas
and identified strongly with the people there, making drawings and portraits of them.
He wanted to unravel, to escape from this edifice we have built, this cultured trap that
we have made for ourselves, and get to something where we are once again in union
with the mythic and regenerative power of nature.
One of the best examples I can think of about making a truly personal mythology
that closes off meaning instead of opening access to it is the story of the tattoo on the
left arm of my student Hedwig (fig. 4), a very good painter who came to study with me
in Munich because she couldn’t get in anywhere else. She was in a rock band and when
she arrived she was covered in tattoos. I thought seriously of not accepting her, but it
has turned out great. On her arm is a picture of a bird, and the bird represents her
flight from Berlin to Munich. It is not decoration, but it is also not decipherable by
anybody and everybody the way the instructions in the telephone booth are. It’s another
example of our attempt, our need, to create personal mythology. It goes along with the
freedoms of democracy where everybody becomes either king or queen of their own
castle. So, if you were to see her walking along the street and you were to look at her
arms and her legs and some of these symbols, you wouldn’t understand what they were,
but if a Masai was walking through an
African village marked up, the other
Masai who understand the language
would know what those marks meant.
And that is a big difference, for now
we don’t agree on anything anymore.
Everything is in crisis in a sense, everything
is up for debate, and it is possible
that these body marks may be more
permanent than any human relationship
this young artist will ever have.
This, I believe, is a powerful strike
against the way things are going, this
interest on the part of young people
to mark themselves up, put things on
themselves and make a commitment,
the kind of commitment that you can’t
make on the internet, where you press
a button and it’s gone.
This kind of gesture, a way of doing
something to yourself that you cannot
undo, is body art, and there are a couple
of artists around who exhibit their
bodies. But people only understand the
story behind Hedwig’s tattoos if she
83 American Art
4 Hedwig’s tattoo, Munich, 2004
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explains it to them. So that means that the tattoos communicate to about ten people,
and she’s happy with the exclusivity of her very personal mythology.
I guess I have created my own personal mythology too. For example, I made a painting
called Precious (frontispiece) which, like Hedwig’s tattoo, involves travel, but I want
my work to be more accessible. I had been talking about my leaving Ireland with my parents
and how the boat got lost. I was thinking about this and I made a painting with a
little insert inside. I was very small when we came over from Ireland just after the war; it
was dangerous, and the boat got lost, and I remembered it, and then I made the painting.
That word “precious” is based on something my mother said, that I was “precious cargo.”
So I made a painting within a painting—it’s encased, protected by a bigger painting, a
six-foot painting. So there’s personal mythology right there.
In a sense my work is a question of trying to retrieve the irretrievable. My work has a
lot of yearning in it. There is a structure, and the structure is being undone or subverted
by a sense of emotion and of loss.
I’m kind of moving in a direction different from the way the majority in the art world
is moving right now, I believe. I’m including mysticism, mystery, spirituality in my work.
I believe the problems artists had at the beginning of the twentieth century, which caused
such a reaction, which caused such an upsurge in the pursuit of the “primitive” and the
mythic, again happened after the end of the terrors of the Second World War because of
the crisis they faced, because of what they saw come to pass. The world became mechanized
and this irresistible juggernaut rolled over everything and has given us the world
84 Fall 2004
5 Sean Scully, Hammering, 1980. Oil,
110 x 174 in. Private collection
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that we live in now. In my own response, I like to speak through the language of rhythm.
Rhythm is direct, and you can feel it. If I stand in the wrong place in the wrong time in
the relation to the history of art, I like that just fine.
The painting Hammering (fig. 5), for example, embodies a primitive form of
rhythm. The colors I use are black and white, and Hammering is aggressively painted.
In these paintings in the 1980s, I was trying to refind, retake, reconnect myself with
something very particular to painting, the ability to do something that is in fact fundamental
and impossible to improve on, technologically speaking. In other words, it is
me with a brush and a bucket of paint in front of a canvas, and it always will be (fig. 6).
The light in the painting obviously is a battle between light and dark, a battle is being
hammered out on a huge format, but the white in the painting is not as white as the
black in the painting is black. And that represents, I imagine, a flawed or damaged
sense or limited sense of hope. It is
not a battle between light and dark,
but a battle between nearly light
and very dark.
Sometimes, when hard times
come, I just do what I can do. After
the death of my mother recently, I
made a small painting called Ivy,
the name everyone called her, which
reminded me a little of Brancusi’s
Kiss. It was exhibited this spring in
the cowshed of a Kunstpalace in
Germany with a series called Holly,
in fourteen parts.
When my son Paul died in 1984,
I made a painting for him that was
related to a kind of altarpiece format
I had used for my Maesta (fig. 7),
which is an homage to Duccio’s
painting in Siena, Italy, to the art
of the sacred. The idea with both
of my paintings is that the middle
panel has body and weight and it
projects out into space in a sense
like a figure, like an aggressive figure,
or a figure that could be moving
out of the painting. Paul (fig. 8)
has a central panel that is body size,
the width of a body, in black and
white vertical bands, and it’s set into
a kind of landscape of pink and gray
on one side. And Maesta is taking
the colors of Duccio’s great Maestà
from the fourteenth century. Sienese
painters were very fond of blue and
red, blue taken from the robes of
the Virgin Mary. And then what I
tried to do with the outside of that
85 American Art
6 Photo of Sean Scully, Barcelona,
2000
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one was to make it into something that was very elemental in a sense. It is devoid of
color, because I believe that color is connected to living life, the natural world, and
black and white are connected more to the world of idea, concept, or thought. That’s
how I tried to use it in that painting. Maesta came first, then Paul, also in the triptych
format.
These autobiographical narratives can be points of reference that help explain how
paintings came to be. Artists do derive images, colors, and ideas from a personal
narrative, a memory bank, that can build or be called myth. But in truth the major
goal of my art is that play between rhythm, the inner rhythm of things, and ideas.
(I wrote my master’s thesis on the rhythm transformed in Henri Matisse’s Dance.)
Art is not really a question of conclusions or closed opinion. It is something that
keeps us alive and it becomes more vital as the world continues on its merry slide. I
want mine to be more accessible than Hedwig’s tattoo. That’s nice if you know the
story, but I’d like my work also to speak through the universal language of rhythm.
Rhythm communicates in a primal way, directly and through feeling. You look at all
86 Fall 2004
7 Sean Scully, Maesta, 1983. Oil,
96 x 120 in. Smithsonian American
Art Museum, Washington, D.C.,
Museum purchase through the
Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen
Endowment © 1983 Sean Scully
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87 American Art
8 Sean Scully, Paul, 1984. Oil,
102 x 126 in. Tate Gallery,
London, Presented by the Patrons
of New Art through the Friends
of the Tate Gallery 1986
Photo Credits
79, 83, 84, 87, Courtesy of Sean
Scully; 80, Photo by Ben Blackwell;
81, Photo by Piene-Alain Ferrazzini;
85, Courtesy of Sean Scully, Photo
by Liliane Tomasko
my paintings and you see different rhythms: it goes fast, then it goes slow in different
sections of a painting, and then the color changes—from idea to body, and then back
to idea or back to spirit.
Abstract painter Sean Scully maintains studios in Munich and Barcelona as well as his main
studio in New York City, and he exhibits internationally. This essay is adapted from the
lecture “Mythology and Abstraction,” which he presented at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza
in Madrid in July 2003.
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