.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Spanning three metres in width, Red Stanza (1969) is a radiant example of the innovative, freeform abstract works which made Sam Gilliam’s name in the 1960s. A spectrum of luminous reds, yellows, pinks, blues and greens unfolds across the surface. Gilliam made the work by pouring and splashing dilute acrylic pigment onto a length of unprimed canvas, which was then folded and left to dry before being stretched over a frame. The colours bleed into one another and pool into rippling, reflected vertical shapes. These intervals—formed where the fabric was folded back on itself—are a hallmark of Gilliam’s ‘Slice paintings.’ They balance the work’s chromatic effusion with a rhythmic compositional structure. These paintings also feature distinctive bevelled edges, which emphasise their physical presence and extend the object of the canvas into space. ‘The surface is no longer the final plane of the work’, said Gilliam. ‘It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theatre of life’ (quoted in A. Gawlak, ‘Solids and Veils’, Art Journal, no. 50, vol. 1, 1991, p. 10).
Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962 after studying at the University of Louisville. Inspired early on by artists including Emil Nolde and Paul Klee, he was soon drawn to the work of Washington Colour School painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Thomas Downing. The latter, who became a close friend, encouraged Gilliam to move away from his initial experiments with hard-edged abstraction towards a more fluid approach, aided by the use of water-tension breaker—a paint additive that was the Colour School’s ‘secret ingredient’—that allowed multiple layers of colour to blend seamlessly and sink into canvas. Gilliam created his first painting using this brushless staining method in 1966. The more complex ‘Slice paintings’ developed soon afterwards, and in 1968 he began making his famed ‘Drape paintings’, which left behind the stretcher entirely to be hung freely in space.
These were pivotal years for Gilliam. In 1967, aged just thirty-three, he was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. A grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, administered by the influential curator Walter Hopps, allowed him to give up his day job as a high-school art teacher and paint full time from 1968. He shared a large studio with the artist Rockne Krebs, another Colour School follower whose transparent plastic sculptures and experiments with laser spurred Gilliam to expand the parameters of his own work. In a decade dominated by the austerity of Conceptual and Minimal art, Gilliam tied his formalist approach to painting with a radical conception of the canvas as object, blurring boundaries with a baroque painterly exuberance.
Red Stanza’s title invokes a group of lines within a poem. The painting’s vertical bands work as a similar structural element, organising its effects and tempering the chance-based efflorescence of its colours. These uprights can be related to those in Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), a painting that Gilliam greatly admired. He also discussed his use of colour in terms of ‘sheets of sound’, referring to the improvisatory method of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Indeed, while he is allied with the Colour Field artists, Gilliam arguably has less in common with their pursuit of elegant flatness than he does with the energetic intensity of free jazz, or the lyrical gestures of painters such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning. ‘The canvases are richly atmospheric,’ wrote Jay Kloner of the ‘Slice paintings’. ‘Their colours appear and reappear, changed, so the paintings continually refract within themselves as monumental visual fugues’ (‘Indoor Paintings’, in Sam Gilliam: Indoor & Outdoor Paintings 1967-1978, exh. cat., University Gallery, Amherst, 1978, p. 15).
Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1962 after studying at the University of Louisville. Inspired early on by artists including Emil Nolde and Paul Klee, he was soon drawn to the work of Washington Colour School painters such as Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Thomas Downing. The latter, who became a close friend, encouraged Gilliam to move away from his initial experiments with hard-edged abstraction towards a more fluid approach, aided by the use of water-tension breaker—a paint additive that was the Colour School’s ‘secret ingredient’—that allowed multiple layers of colour to blend seamlessly and sink into canvas. Gilliam created his first painting using this brushless staining method in 1966. The more complex ‘Slice paintings’ developed soon afterwards, and in 1968 he began making his famed ‘Drape paintings’, which left behind the stretcher entirely to be hung freely in space.
These were pivotal years for Gilliam. In 1967, aged just thirty-three, he was honoured with a solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. A grant from the Washington Gallery of Modern Art, administered by the influential curator Walter Hopps, allowed him to give up his day job as a high-school art teacher and paint full time from 1968. He shared a large studio with the artist Rockne Krebs, another Colour School follower whose transparent plastic sculptures and experiments with laser spurred Gilliam to expand the parameters of his own work. In a decade dominated by the austerity of Conceptual and Minimal art, Gilliam tied his formalist approach to painting with a radical conception of the canvas as object, blurring boundaries with a baroque painterly exuberance.
Red Stanza’s title invokes a group of lines within a poem. The painting’s vertical bands work as a similar structural element, organising its effects and tempering the chance-based efflorescence of its colours. These uprights can be related to those in Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles (1952), a painting that Gilliam greatly admired. He also discussed his use of colour in terms of ‘sheets of sound’, referring to the improvisatory method of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane. Indeed, while he is allied with the Colour Field artists, Gilliam arguably has less in common with their pursuit of elegant flatness than he does with the energetic intensity of free jazz, or the lyrical gestures of painters such as Pollock and Willem de Kooning. ‘The canvases are richly atmospheric,’ wrote Jay Kloner of the ‘Slice paintings’. ‘Their colours appear and reappear, changed, so the paintings continually refract within themselves as monumental visual fugues’ (‘Indoor Paintings’, in Sam Gilliam: Indoor & Outdoor Paintings 1967-1978, exh. cat., University Gallery, Amherst, 1978, p. 15).