This painting changed the course of art

The painting in question is Sean Scully’s Backs and Fronts, a piece of abstract art created in the 1980s that caused a paradigm shift in art history. Scully has been described as an artist who belongs on the shortest of shortlists in terms of ‘artists of our times’ because his 1981 piece spoke to a visual language that really makes you feel. Far from the mathematical coldness and predictability you might expect from art made up entirely of straight lines, the piece has the kind of emotional depth that gives it an almost transformative power.

Moving on from minimalism

Backs and Fronts was created in 1981 when Minimalism - which was the dominant movement at the time - had run out of steam. Minimalism removed from art all traces of human emotion, something that eventually exploded in on itself in a hailstorm of criticism about a lack of sensitivity and emotion. When Backs and Fronts appeared it was described as the perfect antidote to this thanks to the clashes of colour, discordant stripes and apparently irrational approach. For many people it represented something that had never been done before, an infinity of coloured stripes moving in every direction, as if depicting a musical score.

The origins of Backs and Fronts

The painting first started out as a smaller response to Picasso’s 1921 Cubist Portrait Three Musicians. Initially the artist decided that four musicians would be better than three and so set out to create the initial version of the piece with just four panels. From there Scully continued expanding and expanding it until he reached what he described as a final composition that was “thunderous.”

A pivotal moment for contemporary art

Backs and Fronts has frequently been described as a key moment in the evolution of contemporary art. But how did the artist create something so monumental? His innovation comes via early years apprenticing with a printer in London, where he also discovered The Tate and Van Gogh. He then went to the Croydon School of Art - the only art school willing to take him then - where he made the momentous decision to no longer paint figuratively. He started to get interested in Piet Mondrian and Mark Rothko and a trip to Morocco in the late 1960s was where he first discovered the lexicon of lines woven into textiles that started off an obsession with stripes.

Art is our salvation

During interviews Scully has described the way that he feels about art - “I think of [it] as something profound - as our salvation.” Since the 1980s his work has continued to pursue the stripe and the endless ways that it can be worked into art, creating relief and redemption for the eyes of the viewer, a kind of salvation, and making him one of the most renowned artists in the world.

Backs and Fronts may not seem particularly remarkable to the untrained eye but the impact it had in 1981 - and the way it has been received since - has meant it has changed the world of contemporary art forever.