Blue, Black and White Composition

Hilton Kramer, art critic for The New York Times from 1965 to 1982, called William Scott ‘the best painter of his generation in England’. Scott was an artist who found inspiration in the everyday. At the beginning of his career he worked in the Post-Impressionist tradition, painting distinctive still lifes of domestic objects, while his later work tended towards abstraction as he pursued greater simplification of forms. Created in 1952–3, Scott’s lithograph Blue, Black and White Composition represents a transitional period in his artistic development. While the subject remains traditional – a still life of a table – the treatment is so abstract as to make it almost unrecognisable. The table itself is rendered as a flat, black rectangle against a teal background, while objects on the table are reduced to featureless blue and white blocks. Scott was raised in Enniskillen near the current site of the Fermanagh County Museum, making the print a valuable addition to the museum’s collection both artistically and as a piece of local history. The museum holds one of the world’s most significant collections of Scott’s work, and this lithograph provides a fascinating comparison to the works held by the museum.