Alison Watt

Flowers East, London

Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Alison Watt: Fold, New Paintings 1996-97, 4 October to 15 November 1997, nos. 17 and 18 (illus. in exhibition catalogue pp. 50-1)

Madame Riviere: The canvas is original. There is a very minor undulation to the canvas in the extreme lower left corner around the stretcher. Otherwise in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Unframed. Fragment V: The canvas is original. On close inspection there is some extremely minor paint lifting to the extreme left of the upper edge. Otherwise in good original condition, clean and ready to hang. Ultraviolet light reveals no sign of retouching. Unframed.
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After graduating from Glasgow School of Art in 1988, Watt quickly became well known for her bold and intensely observed figurative style. During this period, she focussed primarily on depicting the female nude within untidy domestic spaces surrounded by everyday objects such as unmade bed sheets and crumpled clothes. Increasingly, she developed an interest in the texture and material nature of these objects themselves and drapery and fabric became integral components of her compositions. As her husband Ruaridh Nicoll observed, "when the day ended and the models left, Alison stood at her easel, looking at the crushed fabric where their [the model's] bodies had been and in those impressions she saw the possibilities that would take her forward. In her paintings, the model was soon separated from the fabric, and, in the end, no longer required...to me, the folded fabric of her paintings became the body, and often the body at its most intimate" (Ruaridh Nicoll, Perfecting a Vision of Life for the Dead, Scotland on Sunday, 25 July 2004).

The interest in texture led to a reassessment of the work of her long term inspiration, Jean Auguste Ingres. She looked once again at his opulent 19th century Odalisques and in contrast to the more formal portraits of Mesdames Rivière and Moitessier, "what I came to realise was that the paintings of fabric were more sensual than the paintings of the body" (Alison Watt quoted in an exhibition catalogue at the Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004). Her discovery prompted an important series of diptychs including the present work which released the female figure from within the confines of her earlier cluttered domestic spaces and paired them with a panel devoted to decorative printed fabric and swathes of material. Each work in the series is closely related to specific Odalisques and the present work, Madame Rivière and Fragment V, directly references Ingres' Madame Rivière (fig.1, 1805, Musée du Louvre, Paris). The figure in Watt's work clearly takes her pose from Ingres and the drapery detail which forms the left hand section of the diptych, again directly references the folded drapery covering the right arm of Ingres' figure. Included in her seminal exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery in 1997, the present work is crucial in demonstrating the counterpoint between figuration and abstraction that has become a defining feature of Watt's oeuvre.