Earning His Stripes

By ROBERT HUGHES

A painting being so much more than its subject, you can't pin down an artist by naming his favorite motif. From Mondrian and the Russian constructivists on, many an abstract artist has gone for the stripe in all its apparent simplicity -- the line that baldly, mysteriously becomes a form in itself. Yet their paintings are not like one another's: there is no confusing the precise black vibration of a Bridget Riley with the effect of one of Barnett Newman's "zips" or the slightly blurred, funereal pinstriping of an early Frank Stella. Today the stripe continues to linger in the wings of late modernism and is the adopted sign of one of the most toughly individual artists in America, Sean Scully. What, after so many other stripes, has he made of it? Not the emblem of a lost utopianism but something fierce, concrete and obsessive, with a grandeur shaded by awkwardness -- a stripe like no one else's.

Scully is 44, a pale, knobbly-faced Irishman who was born in Dublin, studied in London and since 1975 has lived in New York City. The show of his work that is currently traveling in Europe (it has already been at London's Whitechapel Art Gallery, is now at Munich's Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus and will go on to Madrid in September) is not a retrospective. It covers his early maturity, from 1982 to 1988. But Scully has been fixed on the stripe since he was an art student.

At first it was an optical shimmer, a weaving of color energy on the surface, in deference to the prevalent American art theory of the day and, to some degree, in homage to Riley. The work of Mark Rothko, which Scully had seen as a student, was a presiding influence. It had shown him how a neutral and even boring form, an imperfect rectangle, could accumulate reserves of feeling and cogitation -- how the life of the mind and its tentative decisions could be embodied, not just illustrated, in pigment. And there had been a visit to Morocco in 1970; there Scully saw stripes everywhere, dyed into awnings and djellabas and bolts of cloth, not a theoretical form but a motif embedded, as it were, in the landscape. Then he moved to New York and, as he puts it in the catalog, felt driven to paint "severe, invulnerable canvases, so I could be in this environment and not feel exposed. I spent five years making my paintings fortress-like."

He let go of the clean edges and began to work thickly in oils instead of acrylic. The grid of Scully's paintings in the '80s speaks of two things: a desire for large order and a sense of impending slippage, as though the columns and lintels of paint had to be constantly tested, as though their pinning could come apart just as the painter turned his back. They are not smoothly designed but look somewhat improvised, like the sides of large huts. They are very "New York" paintings, but the city they evoke is not the foreigner's imagined grid of perfect planes; rather it is gritty, heavy, slapped-together lower Manhattan, where Scully has his studio: the hoardings of warped plywood, the metal slabs patching the street.

Nobody could take these paintings for supergraphics. Their mood is, above all, reflective. They aspire to a rough, Doric calm. They do not move; or when they do, it is by a slow pressure of grainy abutting edges or, in a work like No Neo, 1984, by the slight bulging of stripes against their neighbors, like the entasis of a classical column. (The title means something; Scully wanted his painting to resist the sense of recycling that pervaded the '80s, neo-this and neo-that. "The art that interests me," he says flatly, "is heroic art.")

The sense of internal pressure confers urgency on these big surfaces and turns them into something other, and more physically compelling, than flat pattern. It's not that Scully has any strong sculptural impulse; when he makes one slab of a painting project an inch or two above the adjoining surface, it is still not meant to be seen in the round or to suggest material weight. But he does want to give the image the distinctness of a body, asserting itself against your gaze.

The world keeps peeping in, especially in Scully's color, which is richly organic and never blatant. Its tawny ochers and deep blues suggest landscape, though in a distant way. The whites in Pale Fire, 1988, are not flat white but a subtle paste applied over a warm brown ground in rapidly varying touches, so that they have the visual elasticity of flesh. Scully is a conservative, measured colorist. His sense of art, the seemingly obsolete act of communicating by smearing mud on cloth, is anchored in the past. You can see traces of his idols throughout -- especially, in his liking for silvery grays, pinks and a constant regulating black, Velasquez.

The paint goes on thickly but not with abandon. The surface seems to store light, like stone. It is opaque; you can't see through it or even into it. It is not about space. Besides, the inlaid, modular, even puzzle-like surfaces of Scully's recent canvases prevent the eye from roaming them too freely. Stray out of one box and you finish in another, not on a free horizon. Hence the density, the lack of spaces between things, which adds to the gravity of Scully's work. It has something to do with the largeness of architecture. But it is painting, all the way through.