Cincinnati art 3 -- comparison shopping

In the Cincinnati Art Museum I saw two paintings that reminded me of works by the same artists I had seen recently.  One I liked the Cincinnati work better, one I liked the work I had seen earlier better.

First the (relative) disappointment.  I've always loved Gerhard Richter, and was so happy to find several of his works on display in the museums I visited this summer in Germany. 

So last week I found a new Richter in Cincinnati, made last year; I haven't been to the museum in several months and this is the first time I've seen it.  It's from his Abstract Painting series.  He has made hundreds of these paintings, each of them heavily layered, scraped, overpainted, sanded away and reworked to show depths upon depths.  If you want to get a flavor of this body of work, click here and here and here and here.

I've seen several of these in the flesh, but this is the smallest, only about 20 inches wide.  Don't get me wrong, if you gave this to me I'd hang it in my living room in a nanosecond and love it forever.  But I didn't think it had the depth and richness of color of the painting I saw in Nürnberg. Nor the sheer impact of size: the Nürnberg picture was about four times bigger on each dimension than the Cincinnati one.

Gerhard Richter, Abstract Painting (908-02), 2009  (Cincinnati Museum of Art)

Gerhard Richter, Abstraktes Bild, (Abstract Picture) 1991  (Neues Museum, Nürnberg) 

The next pair of paintings comes from Sam Gilliam.  I wrote earlier this month about a new piece that was just acquired by the Speed Museum in Louisville.

In this pair, I like the Cincinnati version better. In the three years between these two paintings, Gilliam did away with stretcher bars and suspended his canvas from a single point on the wall. My only quibble with this method of display is that you only get to see half of the gorgeous surface, mostly composed of stains and drops rather than brushwork.



Sam Gilliam, Arch, 1971    (Cincinnati Museum of Art)  -- detail below

Sam Gilliam, Restore, 1968 (Speed Museum, Louisville)

Seeing this piece made me want to go home and put grommets into my quilts instead of hanging sleeves and sticks!  But I always have that thought upon visiting this piece, and have never yet managed to translate the thought into action.

Sam Gilliam -- fun with canvas

On a recent visit to the Speed Art Museum in Louisville, I saw a new piece by Sam Gilliam, the great Color Field painter who grew up in Louisville.  To clarify, it's new to the museum but made in 1968, at a critical time in Gilliam's career.  He was just on the verge of liberating canvas from the stretcher bars, as in this big draped work from the following year.

Sam Gilliam, Swing, 1969














But I'm ahead of myself.  In 1968, when he made "Restore," he was only halfway there.  Yes, he ended up with the canvas on a stretcher, but he started with it loose, and in fact painted it in a manner that is familiar to many of us fiber artists who manipulate fabric in dye.

Sam Gilliam, Restore, 1968

The wall sign at the Speed says:  "Building on his earlier experiments with folding rice paper, Gilliam applied color by pouring paint onto a sheet of unprimed, unstretched canvas, which was then folded in various places while the paint was wet.  Additional paint was applied as the artist continued to fold and refold the canvas, creating a layering of several surfaces.  Paint mixed with aluminum powder was applied at the end."

Because of the folding, the painting ended up with surface texture impossible to achieve working on an easel (unless you pressed another piece of canvas into the wet paint).

Definitely good enough to eat.