SAM GILLIAM: "Untitled" [1970]
Among a section of contemporary art previewed for their upcoming auction, Sotheby's holds Sam Gilliman's 1970 painting, Untitled. This piece, done in acrylic on canvas, sprawling 50 by 54 inches on the wall, boasts brilliant hues of aquamarines, magentas, and blues, splashing essences and vibrations of color across the painting itself. I was immediately drawn in by its Frankenthaleresque, subliminal feeling. I thought on first glance that it may have even been a Frankenthaler -- it reminded me of her Concerto that she did in the 80's.
After reading more, I found out that Sam Gilliam was one of Helen Frankenthaler's very own contemporaries, and we could go as far to say even a student of her style. The 60's had been defined by artists like her as well as Rothko and Newman, and Gilliam studied their new-but-alerady-influential work leading up to the execution of this piece in 1970. Gilliam, working from this perspective, as well as his own as a Black man during the Civil Rights movement in Washington DC, added to the distinct style of postwar modernism and the Color Field painting that has come to define it as a movement.
Accompanying exhibition text or specialists that could relay this message beside the piece, as a part of the viewing experience, were both absent. But even with added context missing from the piece, Untitled absolutely demands attention, almost reverence. You must sit in it for a few moments before you rationalize it, explain it -- and this is not a request on the piece's behalf, but rather an effect, an unyielding consequence. This is something that is completely lost online, even if you can see the hues and their forms relatively accurately (from a single perspective). Like other Color Field works, it cannot be flattened to a computer screen. These pieces require you to jump in them; they activate you upon seeing.
An element that deepens this feeling is Gilliam choice of a beveled canvas instead of a standard cornered one. Gilliam, who was known for his tendency to remove the canvas from its frame and drape his paintings, keeps this one framed, only the sides of the frame melt into the front. It creates an enveloping perspective, drawing you in closer and closer. And, the closer you get, the more the piece changes. There was not one moment I looked at this painting and saw the same scene -- five feet away, they are equidistant splotches; one foot away and to the left the same splotches are engorged and interact differently with the others; a few inches away and you are swimming in it, only able to access one or two colors at a time. Each square inch is a painting in and of itself.
Further, Gilliam's technique makes you want to keep looking at it, keep finding more little niches within the larger picture. He creates through sharp understanding of color and form an effect of softness upon the canvas, as if his acrylic was wet watercolor ink bleeding into tencel bed sheets. He softens borders, creating undulating, fading suggestions of margins. Tender pinks interact with defiant emeralds in sinuous, organic, inexplicable movements; bleeding splashes of olive and periwinkle mirror each other, speaking despite a chasm of beige between them. The brain creates meaning out of these shapes, but they never stay fixed. What shape was once a bird on a branch is now a baby girl reclining is now a tulip is now a drawing room ottoman. This is Gilliam's genius -- he accesses in his audience a deeply latent, almost divine, familiarity through the elicitation of simple and organic ideas of shape, ideas of form. The interaction of these ideas before our eyes is captivating: ever-changing, ephemeral, reflective, and completely personal.
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