Alison Watt

Flowers Gallery, London, where acquired by the present owners in 1998

Edinburgh, The Fruitmarket Gallery, Alison Watt, Fold, New Paintings 1996-7, 4th October - 15th November 1997, cat. nos.9 & 10, illustrated pp.40-1.

Both canvases are original and appear sound. There are two tiny scuffs in the lower right corner of Fragment I. Subject to the above, the works both appear to be in excellent overall condition. Ultraviolet light reveals some small spots of retouching at the centre of the left edge, one small fleck at the lower left corner, and a few small flecks in the upper right corner of Fragment I. The works are held within simple gilt painted wood frames. Please telephone the department on +44 (0) 207 293 6424 if you have any questions regarding the present work.
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Watt first rose to prominence in 1987 whilst still a student at the Glasgow School of Art, winning a commission to paint Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, and together with fellow Glasgow student Jenny Saville, leads the way in British figurative painting with her bold and intensely observed style. Yet there is a historical rooting in Watt’s work which aligns her more closely to Britain’s most internationally recognised artist, Lucian Freud, especially in her early 1990s compositions. In the growing face of the YBA movement Watt remained focused and unchanged to her very precise, almost academic approach, which over the years has proved her greatest strength.

With a soft, delicate palette Watt increasingly developed an interest in the texture and material nature of her portrait paintings, and the objects, props and fabrics contained within them. As Watt later wrote ‘what I came to realise was that the paintings of fabric were more sensual than the paintings of the body’ (The Artist, quoted in Alison Watt (exh. cat.), Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, 2004, unpaginated). This intense interest in texture led to a reassessment of the work of her long term inspiration Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, both in his society portraiture and his elegant reclining nudes. Her rediscovery prompted an important series of diptychs, including the present work, which released the female figure from the confines of her earlier cluttered, domestic space and paired them with a panel of matching size devoted to a close-up reinterpretation of the fabrics. Each relating to specific works, in the present composition Watt looked towards La Grande Odalisque (1814, Musée du Louvre, Paris), with the truncated form employing the formalist device Ingres favoured – known as The Line of Beauty – to shape his figure around an elongated ‘s’ form. Watt captures the delicacy of the sitter’s skin in a manner at once reminiscent of Stanley Spencer’s incredibly astute technique, but with a porcelain softness that is immediately recognisable as her own. In the bottom left of the composition, the white rectangle refers to the section of drapery in Ingres’ composition that in turn provides the compositional arrangement of the left hand panel of the diptych.

Included in her seminal exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, in 1997, the present work is crucial in demonstrating the interplay between figuration and abstraction that has become a defining feature of Watt’s oeuvre. The highly figurative nude references her earlier more representational style, whilst the abstracted contours of the softly folding fabrics are prophetic of her more recent work, including her 2000 exhibition Shift at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, which featured twelve large-scale paintings, taking materials as their sole subject matter.