Before this retrospective I had never thought of Sean Scully’s painting as particularly controversial. But both the artist’s conversation and his admirers’ writing return to a defensive posture sufficiently often that Victoria Combalia begins her catalogue essay by noting this habit, which she explains as a craving to counter charges of conservatism levied by “those who, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, think in terms of progress in modern art.”¹ This is a weird beast to have to slay. Still, the weapon Scully draws against it strikes me as equally odd. Scully is aware that the qualities