Andrew Huber
Head of Department
PROPERTY FROM THE ESTATE OF SHERMAN K. EDMISTON, JR.
Lot 9
SAM GILLIAM(1933-2022)Blue Unions
1972
1972
Amended
16 November 2022, 17:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$731,175 inc. premium
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Specialist, Head of Sale
SAM GILLIAM (1933-2022)
Blue Unions
1972
acrylic on canvas
signed, titled and dated '72 on the reverse
52 by 52 in.
132.1 by 132.1 cm.
1972
acrylic on canvas
signed, titled and dated '72 on the reverse
52 by 52 in.
132.1 by 132.1 cm.
Footnotes
Provenance
Sotheby's, New York, Contemporary Art, 15 March 2006, Lot 120
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
The late Sam Gilliam has come into focus as one of the most pioneering painters of the last 50 years whose formal endeavors with the drip-pour, soak-stain, fold-press, and sculptural possibilities of painting are recognized as some of the boldest and most exciting developments to come out of the post-minimalist, post-expressionist passage of the canon. In Gilliam we see not only the mantle of Abstract Expressionism being taken up by a more politically-charged and experimentally fearless figure, but a new language of abstract painting developing a social gravity that opened up possibilities and pathways in the medium to a nascent generation of black abstract artists. The present work, Blue Unions from 1972, comes from one of the most illustrious and important moments in Gilliam's early career. Following his debut museum solo exhibition at the Phillips Collection in Washington D.C. in 1967, Gilliam was invited to exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1971, and in 1972 to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale alongside Diane Arbus, Keith Sonnier, Richard Estes, amongst others – a breakthrough moment as the first African American artist to do so. Blossoming with an array of oranges and reds that sit crisply over a soft wash of blues and maroons, the impression of a vigorous, taut process is belied by Blue Unions tactile delicacy. It is a painting that is fantastically visionary for its time and elegantly reveals the threads that bind Gilliam to his art historical precedents and contemporary inspirators. Its coming from the collection of Sherman K. Edmiston only affirms this as a painting of serious quality by one of the artists so highly regarded by those connoisseurs of his time.
Gilliam emerged in the mid-1960s during a period of significant sparring in the discourse surrounding painting. Michael Fried's text Art and Objecthood, published in Artforum in June 1967, cast the protagonists of this new schism in painting in two discrete schools, those of 'theatrical' and those of 'literalist' sensibilities. With the fading primacy of Abstract Expressionism and the ascendant critical place of Minimalism and Pop Art, the traditional uniformity of the painterly support had been brought to bear by the medium specificity and non-illusionistic painting that was so dominant in the 1940s and 1950s. Into this fray, Gilliam's debut solo and group exhibitions proposed new avenues of thought that appeared to subvert and coalesce the techniques of Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and Robert Morris. Gilliam's approach was far more organic than it was derivative, however. He often cited the experience of witnessing a group of women washing and hanging out laundry from the window of a friend's back yard as the very spark that initiated his newfound process. Not only did this bring into play a kinship with the techniques of Louis and Helen Frankenthaler – whose staining of the raw canvas was highly regarded at this point – but it placed Gilliam's technique in a quasi-social sphere. His paintings were in dialogue with the nature of labor, of unseen work, of women's work. The paintings were first and foremost, however, beautiful, as Andrew Hudson remarked of his first institutional solo exhibition in 1967, it is 'a "major breakthrough" in Sam Gilliam's work [...] suddenly and dramatically, a former follower of the Washington Color School emerged as having broken loose from the "flat color areas" style, and as an original painter in his own right [...] I would go so far as to call them masterpieces of their kind'
(Andrew Hudson, 'Sam Gilliam: Phillips Collection and Jefferson Place Gallery', Artforum, March 1968, Online).
Through his newfound technique of soaking the canvas in acrylic paint, twisting and folding the fabric to allow the pigments to bloom and blend between the fibers, before applying a much heavier pigment that was pressed and pulled across the faces of the folds to establish primary and secondary layers of paint, Gilliam made painting a practice of process, of work. Further inspired by the improvisatory ethos of jazz, his lyrical abstractions reveal a plenitude of
forms, moods and materials. What Fried might have termed theatrical in its presentation – if not certainly in its execution – Gilliam takes up a stance against the literalism of sculpture and painting that was championed by David Smith, Antony Caro, Kenneth Noland and Jules Olitski. Gilliam's revolutionary
mode removes the explicit nature of abstraction as it had been known and makes the unseen mechanics of his methodology – like the rehearsals and backstage movements of theatre – an absent participant in the painting. Robert Morris commented of this new dormant-yet-powerful dynamism in painting that 'the better new work takes relationships out of the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the viewer's field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic. [...] One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context' (Robert Morris quoted in Michael Fried, 'Art and Objecthood,' Chicago and London 1998, p. 153). Morris
recognized the relationships that were embedded in this new kind of painting and their symptomatic existence in the space around them and within them – including those of its creation. Whilst Blue Unions superbly demonstrates the art historical grappling that was taking place during the period of the present work's making, Gilliam has often rebuffed an academic reading of his work that attempts to reconcile flatness, objecthood, abstract painting and the legacy
of Pollock. Fred Moten has perhaps written some of the most remarkable words on Gilliam's practice that stands apart in this regard, tracing a history that goes beyond a basic sequential understanding of his art relative to others: 'It's not that Gilliam isn't fully immersed and in love in the history of painting. It's just that he's uncomfortable in it, is discomfiture in it, at restlessness in and out of it, and in and out of others' estimations or misunderstandings of his dis/place/meant in it, of it, having fought and fled its metaphysical supports, in spite of its invasive centering. He's dancing in the collective head, awash, a washerman, not in between Helen Frankenthaler's name and black women's washing's almsful all-but-namelessness. Pan-medial, ana-medial, animaterial,
he's appositional in and to that history and its erasures. Off in them, off to the side in them, or of them, or in some anteblack churchical derangement of in and off and off and out so that the spatial arrangements of category in (art) history are submitted to seismographic, topographic disruption' (Fred Moten, 'The Circe With a Whole in the Middle', Sam Gilliam: Existed Existing, New York 2020).
Gilliam's passing in June of 2022 sent shockwaves through the industry as people took stock of what a huge loss it was for the ecosystem. As an artist who has seen renewed appreciation and celebration in recent decades, supported by major blue-chip galleries and lauded by institutional curators who've included his seminal works in major exhibitions, including a career retrospective at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C., the seminal show Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power at the Tate Modern, in addition to his inclusion in the 2017 Venice Biennale, that saw his draperies hung from the Giardini's central pavilion, Gilliam has long since been seen as one of the major players of contemporary painting since the 1960s, yet his place in the canon is becoming only more central. Blue Unions is a beautiful example of his unique methods and iconic canvases from the pivotal years of his career. Flushed with a rich palette of searing pigments that feel sumptuously organic and fresh, it represents an exemplary piece of art history in its own right, and a masterwork of the highest caliber.
Saleroom notices
Please note that the correct dates for this artist are 1933-2022.
