Sam Gilliam’s Dorothy’s Mondays Headlines Freeman’s Post-War & Contemporary Art Sale

Sam Gilliam’s 'Dorothy’s Mondays' Painting Featured in Upcoming Post War and Contemporary Art Sale — November 14, New York 

In an interview for the 2008 Smithsonian exhibition, Sam Gilliam: Thinking Outside the Frame, the artist said of his work: “I was free to try anything I really wanted to. I was free to be easy or mysterious. I was free to be the artist that I really wanted to be. ... I think that even as an artist is that I discover new things every day, every time I go to a museum, and that’s what the works are there for.” This freedom is evident throughout Gilliam’s long and prolific career, as the artist manipulated paint, color, and canvas in innovative and surprising ways. In the early 1960s, he liberated the canvas from its stretcher and pushed it out into three dimensions. These “drape paintings” became some of his best-known works, large painted and stained swaths of loose canvas that Gilliam tacked to walls, hung from the ceiling, or draped over sawhorses. The paintings broke free of the picture plane, creating sensual, sculptural, all-encompassing objects for viewers to experience viscerally.

After the draped canvases, in the 1970s, Gilliam began engaging the stretcher again, but with a more architectural structure, beveling the edges to bring the picture plane forward into the viewer’s space in a new way. Around 1975, he began a series of White and Black paintings, typically created on beveled canvases, incorporating collaged painted canvas and many layers of paint applied with shag-rug brushes and splatters. A prime example of this series is Abacus Sliding (1977), in the Denver Art Museum's collection, with its intricately impastoed surface and incorporation of geometric shapes.

The present lot, Dorothy’s Mondays, was painted that same year and shares many commonalities in its lively application of paint and its geometric details. Dorothy refers to Dorothy Butler Gilliam, a journalist, author, advocate, and educator, who married the artist in 1962. She was the first African American female journalist hired by The Washington Post and went on to cover the major events of the Civil Rights movement, becoming a well-known and respected writer and editor. The couple had three children and later divorced in the 1980s. 

Dorothy’s Mondays epitomizes Gilliam’s salient Black Paintings series, a riot of color in its geological strata, gestures sweeping and swirling around the canvas, but anchored by the steady black triangle at the center. Fresh to the market, the painting has resided in the present owner’s collection for nearly fifty years, acquired the year after its making at Fendrick Gallery in Washington, D.C., the second gallery to exclusively represent him.