Sam Gilliam - New Now New York Tuesday, March 12, 2024 | Phillips

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  • “Gilliam … led a riot in color and shape over his career.”
    —Kristion Capps
    Sam Gilliam’s New Orleans, 1979, is certainly a riotous display of colors: berry-toned purples and pinks, muted sky blues, and a hint of chartreuse collide in a painterly constellation. With his pastel color palette as the backdrop, Gilliam shapes an impressively rugged landscape of texture. Thick swathes of impasto paint are smeared, splattered and dabbed across the canvas, while parallel linear lines, likely from the artist’s use of a rake dragged through the paint, create a map of “raked furrows”. As scholar Julia Bryan-Wilson describes Gilliam’s work, “the metaphors that come to my mind when I’m in front of these paintings are partly geologic (strata, sedimentation, igneous rock formations) and partly culinary—I think of baked confections, of frosting and sprinkles, of licking and tasting.”In this regard, New Orleans creates an aesthetic experience which enthralls the senses. 

     

    Gilliam, who died in 2022 at the age of 88, solidified his position throughout his career as one of the most innovative contemporary abstract painters in American history, although the attention of the world’s top art institutions proved volatile early in his career. A painting made in 1979, the same year as New Orleans, was acquired that very year by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, only to be relegated to storage for decades. In fact, it was not until 40 years after he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 1971 – the first Black artist to do so – that Gilliam would begin to receive recognition from the art world.

     

    Sam Gilliam, Whirlirama, 1970, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, NY, Artwork: © 2024 Sam Gilliam / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

    Gilliam’s career began to flourish when he moved from Tupelo, Mississippi to Washington D.C. in 1962, the city that he would call his home for the rest of his life, and where he would produce a prolific body of abstraction across a variety of media. Associated with the Washington Color School, which prioritized color and process, Gilliam would rise to prominence in the late 1960s and early 1970s for his large, color-stained drape paintings. While he is best known for these works – and for good reason – his oeuvre is also defined by another innovation: the beveled-edge paintings. Whereas his draped works abandoned the stretcher bar completely, his beveled-edge paintings probed the generative potential of this structure.

     

    New Orleans is a prime example of this technique. Gilliam’s use of custom made beveled-edge stretcher bars has persisted throughout his career since the 1960s, and was in fact borrowed from Ron Davis, fellow American abstractionist painter, at the suggestion of his friend and artist Rockne Krebs:

    “[Krebs] pointed out for us how Ron Davis was using the Plexiglas and allowing [the canvas] to float right in space by putting it on this beveled edge and was something that I ought to try. As I said, I lifted it in order to try it, and it worked.” ii

    By 1968, Gilliam was experimenting with positioning the beveled-edge angle both towards and away from the wall; this created vastly different optical effects, leading the paintings to appear as if emerging from the wall itself or floating upon it. He ultimately preferred to have the front edges chamfered, which we see in New Orleans. This offered Gilliam an illusion of flatness which disguised physical depth. In other words, this technique allowed “his paintings to wax heavy on the wall, at once integral to it and emerging from it.”iii

     

    Also integral to New Orleans’ arresting texture is the artist’s use of collage; close inspection of the work reveals that the canvas is in fact a patchwork of canvas strips. This becomes evident in places where the colors don’t quite align, or where thickly painted acrylic is bisected by canvas divisions. Once again, Gilliam proves his commitment to troubling the boundaries between painting and sculpture by introducing these novel methods of adding dimensionality and texture.

     

    Ultimately, New Orleans is a painting which remains at once elusive and inviting. The meaning behind the title is not readily apparent; the artist did not appear to have a personal connection to the city. Yet perhaps the aura of New Orleans is what inspired this striking work – the joie de vivre, revelry and vibrancy of the cultural center seem to find their way into this painting, imbued within the luminous color and sublime composition. 

     

    i Julia Bryan-Wilson, “The Rake and the Furrow: The art of Sam Gilliam,” ArtForum, vol. 62, issue no. 3, November 2023, online.

    ii Jonathan P. Binstock, Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 2005, p. 40.

    iii Ibid.

    • Provenance

      Private Collection (acquired directly from the artist)
      Thence by descent to the present owner

Property from a Private Collection, Virginia

Ο◆28

New Orleans

signed, titled and dated "New Orleans – 1979 Sam Gilliam" on the reverse
acrylic on collaged beveled edge canvas
40 1/4 x 70 1/4 in. (102.2 x 178.4 cm)
Executed in 1979.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$150,000 - 200,000 

Sold for $190,500

Contact Specialist

Avery Semjen
Associate Specialist, Head of New Now Sale
T +1 212 940 1207
asemjen@phillips.com
 

New Now

New York Auction 12 March 2024