Stairway

In 1940, Scott wrote in her journal, “What I want to get at is something nearer Franz Marc. His abstraction was [used] to express an attitude toward life. Simplification and rhythm, the unity of animal and nature. I would like to express the creative rhythmic unity of man and his world.” The characteristically curved staircase that adorned the outside of so many of Montreal’s early twentieth-century dwellings, creating a kind of decorative rhythm, here provides the setting for a series of stylized human figures whose own curves blend into a rigorously Cubist construction.