At the beginning of 1973 William Scott was in buoyant mood following the opening of his exhibition at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York on 3 January. The catalogue raisonné explains:

‘Two letters addressed to Anne Cruikshank who had written the foreword for the catalogue, convey the artist’s pleasure at the attention the exhibition received, particularly from the American critic Hilton Kramer. The first letter is dated 7 January and informs Anne Cruikshank that Kramer’s review ‘has already sent hundreds of people to see the show’.1 The second letter followed over a week later: ‘The show in NY went off with a bang. The critics of the New York Times liked it and came out in favour a few days after the opening. The gallery was surprised as well as myself, there has been so much chauvinism during the last few years, New Yorkers were surprised that there could be any virtue in a European painter. I enclose cuttings’. Scott had every reason to be pleased with Kramer’s review. It opened by describing him as ‘an artist of uncommon distinction – not only the best painter of his generation in England, but one of the best anywhere’. The works Kramer particularly liked were the ‘black and white and grey paintings’. These pictures he wrote, ‘with their extraordinary freedom and concision, compel us to place his work in the larger context of modern painting as a whole. With none of Bonnard’s or Matisse’s interest in colour-constructions, he nonetheless seems to belong among them – a Northerner who has wrested from his encounter with modern painting some of the classical magic of these illustrious contemporaries and made of it something cooler and more austere, but nevertheless his own.’2

This exhibition was in fact Scott’s fourth at the Martha Jackson Gallery 3 and it was Jackson who later introduced the artist to Walter Moos the owner of Gallery Moos in Toronto. Scott participated in a group show at Gallery Moos in February 1960 4, but it wasn’t until 1973 that he had his first solo exhibition, in which the present painting was exhibited. Further one-man shows followed in 1975 and 1978. Indeed, it proved to be a transitional year in Scott’s professional life on both sides of the Atlantic, as Scott’s long-term London dealers, the Hanover Gallery, closed on 1 April 1973, having represented the artist since 1953, and produced nine solo exhibitions 5. This forced a move to the Gimpel Fils Gallery, who then became Scott’s main dealers for the rest of his career.

The present work, One and Two No.1, 1973 is one of two virtually identical paintings, the other being White Shapes Entering, 1973 (William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1952-1959, cat no.759). As with another pair of paintings from 1973, Brown, Black and White (cat no.756) and Sober Brown (cat no.757) Scott appears to have made one painting to sell at Gallery Moos in Toronto and one for Gimpel Fils in London. White Shapes Entering, 1973, was later bought by the Fermanagh County Museum, Enniskillen around the time of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland's touring exhibition William Scott Still Life Paintings 1946-1978 which opened at the museum in May 1979.
Since the 1940s Scott had made paintings using a small ‘cast’ of still life objects - eggs, grapes, fish, cups, pots, pans, frying basket - and initially these were described in naturalistic fashion and set within a readable, three-dimensional space. The still life offered Scott an ever adaptable subject, which was simultaneously connected to a grand history of European painting and at the same time emotionally austere and universally resonant. As its title suggests in One and Two No.1 only three elements - one pan and two cups - remain. Gone are the densely crowded tabletops of the 1950s, in which colours were layered one on top of another, their impasto surfaces textured with a palette knife and lines inscribed with the wrong end of a brush. Here Scott instead offers an almost zen-like image, which reflects the simplicity of his drawings in charcoal, the white painted ground as smooth and bright as a clean sheet of paper.

Having discarded even his customary line to indicate the table’s edge, Scott’s objects appear untethered, as if floating in space. Despite this, there remains even in these later works, the sense of conflated perspectives, as one sees in ‘outsider’ or children’s art. Here we are unsure if the black pan is/was hanging on a wall, or if we are looking down on it, on a table, while the cups are drawn as if seen from the side. Scott treated the human body and his (more occasional) landscapes, in much the same way, the earlier work, Cornish Harbour, 1951, being a perfect illustration. By flattening the perspective, the ‘contents’ of the painting are stacked one on top of the other, covering the full height of the canvas, as we observe in the tilted tabletops of Pierre Bonnard. The harbour walls rise vertically upwards, while at the same time we seem to be looking down into the boats on the water, an approach reminiscent of the naive Cornish artist Alfred Wallis. The simplicity of this composition, painted over twenty years before the present painting, and its palette of just white, grey and black, hint at the radical simplification Scott would pursue from the end of the 1960s.

As with many British modernists, subject was often only the starting point for painting, the means by which to explore the language of painting itself. In this highly reduced composition, Scott leads the viewer to contemplate the object qualities of the painting itself. The bisected cup on the left and the way the pan ‘hangs’ from the top of the image, both recurring devices, bring the edges of the canvas into conscious focus. Although the motifs appear to float, we have a sense that they are close to the surface of the picture. By denying the viewer a sense of deep pictorial space, Scott foregrounds a more sensory experience of the picture surface - we are invited to respond to its colour, to the motifs as abstract patterns and to the physical size of the painting in relation to the body.

Some critics have commented on the erotic, sexually suggestive nature of Scott’s early still lifes and, indeed, in some works he seems to have consciously arranged his objects to this end - see for example, Pears, 1950 (cat.no 168). While this is less evident in the later works, it is interesting to note that in 1973 Scott undertook a series of small studies of the female body - nicknamed his ‘private suite’ - which have a similar aesthetic to the present painting. These ‘secret’ drawings are a curious accompaniment to his more public paintings, showing how Scott would navigate effortlessly between object, figure and landscape.

In Norbert Lynton’s book on the artist, published in 2004, in the chapter titled ‘Condensation of Sensations’, he identifies paintings such as One and Two No.1 as part of Scott’s ‘neo-classical’ period, relating this new, pared down imagery to William and Mary Scott’s passion for Greek sculpture. Lynton suggests that these works ‘may have been arrived at by moving paper shapes over the canvas. Vestigal forms, indicating changes of mind are now rare. [...] The lines are never mechanical but put in freehand with varying degrees of handwriting character.’ 6 He continues, ‘the clarity of these neoclassical still lifes also addresses our senses as perfection: a few notes cleanly struck, at finely judged intervals. Individual pictures suggest reduction taken to a new extreme. Seeing several of them reveals the lavishness of the whole pursuit. As in the best Neoclassical painting and sculpture, purity is revealed as refined sensuality, austerity as an acute form of luxury.’7

Given the minimalist character of these compositions, it is perhaps not surprising that this new body of work elicited Scott’s first exhibition in Japan in 1976 at the Gallery Kasahara, Osaka, which led on to three further shows by 1980.

The Tate Gallery owns the large 1970s oil Permutations Ochre, 1978 and works from this decade are in the collection of numerous British museums and institutions including Newport Museum and Art Gallery, Jerwood Collection and British Council Collection. Scott’s paintings from the early 1970s are also found in the collection of a number of important US institutions including The Minneapolis Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

1 ‘Painterly Subtleties Fill Work of Scott’, Hilton Kramer, New York Times, 6 January 1973
2 William Scott Catalogue Raisonné of Oil Paintings 1952-1959, Thames and Hudson in association with the William Scott Foundation, London, 2013, p18
3 Scott’s solo shows at Martha Jackson gallery were in 1956, 1959, 1962, 1973 and 1975
4 The exhibition was titled 4 Internationals, and included Scott, Barbara Hepworth, Karel Appel and Antonio Tàpies
5 Plus two solo shows at Gimpel Hanover Zurich in 1966 and 1974
6 Norbert Lynton, William Scott, Thames and Hudson, London, 2004, p311
7 Ibid, p317