“Antically exaggerated, the focus pays off, for me, by illuminating a peculiar psychological intensity in even Gilliam’s most circumspect art: an air of taking nothing for granted and of having things to prove, an asperity in the face of felt or imagined resistance, a hint of playing for stakes beyond what’s visible.”
T esselating, kaleidoscopic shades of crimson, magenta, and cadmium yellow erupt into diluted washes of mauve and pale rose in Sam Gilliam’s Butterfly, Feeling of 1972, a resplendent paragon of his celebrated series of beveled-edge works on canvas which thrust sumptuous, chromatic brilliance into the third dimension. Among his greatest contributions to contemporary art was Gilliam’s adventurous foray into space, in which painting tore free from the confines of the wall and projected into a more liminal realm, one that oscillates between object and image, optics and abstraction. Gilliam remained at the helm of the Washington School of Color alongside peers Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and Alma Thomas, and Butterfly, Feeling singularly captures the musicality, improvisational methods, and liberation of pigment for which Gilliam is so celebrated. Test.mes nt to the present work’s central importance to the artist’s oeuvre, the present work was executed the year of his participation as the United States’ representative in the Venice Bienniale and comes from the distinguished collects ion of visionary California philanthropist Chara Schreyer.
Right: Alma Thomas, Blast Off, 1970. The Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, Washington, D.C.
Across creases and cosmic pleats of color, Butterfly, Feeling takes on a multi-faceted, almost topographical bent. The beveled-edge canvases result from an idiosyncratic, reversed process Gilliam developed in the early 1970s of layering wet pigment on unprimed canvas, twisting, folding, and wringing it out to stretch the newly formed impressions across the bars, making the present work one of the earlier examples of this remarkable development. By further extending the canvas into physical space with a beveled edge, Gilliam subverts the role of the canvas as passive support, transforming it into an active, applicative device. “It is constructed painting,” says Gilliam, “in that it crosses the void between object and viewer to be part of the space in front of the picture plane. It represents an act of pure passage. The surface is no longer the final plane of the work. It is instead the beginning of an advance into the theater of life.” (Sam Gilliam quoted in: Annie Gawlak, “Solids and Veils,” Art Journal, no. 50, vol. 1, 1991, p. 10)
Moving beyond the boundaries of painting, Gilliam bends painting “toward sculpture, folding it into music, letting it hang with performance so that in the coordination of his hand and our eye, painting is beside itself.” (Fred Moten, ‘The Circle With a Hole in the Middle’, 2020) Butterfly, Feeling deliberately resists legibility and enacts an abstraction that, especially at the t.mes of its creation, radically subverted the expectations leveled at African American artists. At t.mes s referred to as a “Third Generation” Color Field artist, Gilliam advances the lineage of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors whilst stripping it of its historic associations with white male hegemony. Though lyrically hued and melodically textured, its spatial complexity directly implicates the viewer within an intricate inter-relation between subject, object, history, and space.
With works residing in such distinguished permanent collects ions as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Centre Georges Pompidou, Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Tate Modern, London; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the Art Institute of Chicago, Gilliam is unequivocally one of the most influential artists of the Post-War period. Butterfly, Feeling prismatically exemplifies Gilliam’s daring charge into the unknown, pushing painting to uncharted territory and prompting a t.mes ly reconsideration of the limits and possibility of the canvas, color, and contemporary art.
