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Sean Scully’s evolution captured in a retrospective at the Modern Art Museum

Sean Scully’s fixation with stripes made him one of the world’s richest painters. He also brought spirituality and passion to abstract painting.

With pieces in countless museums and private collections across the globe, his work commands several exhibitions a year. But a new retrospective, “Sean Scully: The Shape of Ideas,” covers half a century of Scully’s output with 49 paintings and 42 works on paper. After the pandemic shut down its intended premiere in Philadelphia last year, the exhibit is debuting at The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth on view thru Oct. 10.

The Modern has worked with Scully for decades.

The museum owns 20 of his works and this is its third exhibition with him. Born in Ireland and raised in England, he started doing portraits but says he was drawn to the “freedom and international character” of abstract art. Scully’s first commercial show in London sold out. He attended Harvard University in 1972 and moved to New York three years later, which remains his home base. He says he currently lives in a house he bought from Bill Murray.

“I’ve been in America longer than most Americans,” said Scully, who turns 76 this month. Growing up he was drawn to books and films about Europeans in America, along with American blues records. “My paintings are very rhythmical. It’s one of the overriding qualities that distinguishes them. They have a beat running through them that’s very simple and basic, like the blues.”

The retrospective begins with his output from the 1970s.

“In these early works, there’s kind of a marrying of the opticality and psychedelic quality of pop art with the austere lines and grids traditionally associated with minimalism,” said the exhibition’s co-curator, Amanda Sroka, assistant curator of Contemporary Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Scully’s works are also more direct and accessible than most abstract paintings. He even has a distaste for irony.

“I think irony allows you to circumvent, obviously, confrontation,” Scully said. “But it allows you to circumvent sincerity. I really believe sincerity is important, as is love. People who practice irony all the time, and there are many of them in Manhattan, just spend their lives in a kind of sophist game that avoids all human deep interaction.”

By the ’80s, Scully was using darker colors and multiple panels. “Backs and Fronts” began as a homage to Picasso’s “Three Musicians” but ultimately became a turning point in his career. Eight-foot-high and twenty-foot wide, it consists of twelve panels of various sizes. He says the use of different panels represent “the collisions of culture” he sees in America.

Scully also started using insets regularly in the early ’80s. Essentially a painting within a painting, he still uses this motif today—his insets notably turned black during the pandemic—and it is now one of his most recognizable signatures.

From 1983, “The Fall” is a multipaneled painting that protrudes from the wall, revealing Scully’s increasing interest in architecture. Inspired by the interplay of light and shadow on ancient ruins while visiting Mexico, Scully started working with watercolor to study form, color, and light. In the ’90s Scully’s used this method to create one of his most significant bodies of work, the “Wall of Light” series.

“So much of Scully’s work is about an idea that just needs to germinate over time,” Sroka said. “It will come out in different ways before becoming a larger part of a series.”

By the 2000s, the light dims and the mood becomes more somber. “Iona,” for example, is a triptych with Scully once again returning to darker colors. More recent paintings, like “Landline North Blue” from 2014, resemble landscapes, checkerboards, and windows.

“A large part of art, or painting, is craft,” Scully said. “A small part of it is art. You must understand the craft before you can get to the art.”

Scully initially scoffs at the notion that he has a blue-collar approach, but Bono did call him “Bricklayer of the soul” and he was raised in the slums, where he started factory work at 15.

“Obviously that’s marked me very deeply,” he said. “I identify with workers. I’m not pretentious and I wasn’t protected. So, there is something proletariat or blue-collar about the way I work.”

And his enduring interest in abstract painting, particularly the stripe?

“I wanted to find something between pure obsession, which is represented by Agnes Martin, and formalism, which is represented by Frank Stella,” Scully said. “I wanted to take a shape and extend it, simply put. That’s what I’ve been doing. I keep turning it over and turning it around, and it keeps yielding new possibilities.”