Beschreibung:

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.FootnotesProvenance 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 techniq