Living color: in a 40-year retrospective currently in Houston, painter Sam Gilliam reveals a restless concern with freeing color from its familiar constraints

A medley of large, rainbow-colored, tobacco-muslin balls, scrunched up like giant, bouffant flowers, were suspended at different heights above the stairwell that led to "Sam Gilliam: A Retrospective" at the Speed Art Museum in Louisville. Originating at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., this traveling exhibition is dedicated to 40 years of work by the Washington, D.C.-based abstract artist. Accompanied by an excellent catalogue with a thorough and insightful essay by Jonathan P. Binstock, the Corcoran's curator of contemporary art, it is now at its final destination, the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston. The most comprehensive exhibition to date of this prodigiously gifted and prolific talent, it includes more than 40 works, mostly large-scale paintings, mixed-medium constructions and installations, each typically standing in for a series of related pieces. The show's run at the Speed served as a welcome home for Gilliam, who, although born in Tupelo, Miss., in 1933 and a resident of Washington since 1962, was raised in Louisville and graduated from the University of Louisville with an MFA in 1961, spending 20 years of his early life there "waiting for things to start," he says, with a laugh. (1)

Gilliam is best known for his draped or otherwise unconventionally suspended paintings, considered by many to be a major contribution to the history of American formalism. While other artists of the time stained and painted unsized, unstretched canvases--and Gilliam was certainly influenced by the works of Morris Louis, Ken Noland and others of the Washington Color School, as well as by the greater Color Field movement--no one else in the late '60s used canvas to create such grand, glowing environments of color, integrating actual space into the installation. Part painting, part sculpture, part architecture, these works were early examples of the cross-disciplinary, multi-medium hybridizations that became an increasingly familiar practice from the 1970s onward. Gilliam explains, in his wry, quietly self-deprecating way, "It was 1968, and I was making a very large painting at the time--it was about 30 feet long--but a painting that large is rather difficult to sell and not particularly exciting to a dealer. So I thought I'd remove the stretchers."

These usually enormous swaths of cascading canvas, hung from walls and ceilings, sometimes painted in Day-Glo hues for psychedelic luster, dominate the exhibition. Soaked and stained with colors, both pale and vivid, from rosy to cool, the canvases were first painted, then shaped--gathered up at intervals and tied, for instance, into knobs. Often supported by ropes or hooks, the fabric could also be arranged into billowed folds over sawhorses stained or burnt to suit the painting, as in the baroquely exuberant A and the Carpenter I (1973) or Softly Still (1973), in which a blond wood sawhorse is adorned with flowing draperies, like a beautiful gown abandoned by some precipitate Cinderella, evidence of the figurative impulse that consistently underlies Gilliam's abstraction.

The draped works in the exhibition are mostly from 1968-73 except for one eye-catching, exceptionally modest-sized, rakishly angled drape, which was dipped in clear red, green and yellow paint shading into more ambiguous hues. Titled All Cats are Gray at Night, it is from 1996. Gilliam does not feel compelled to proceed in a linear manner but often circles back instead, returning to earlier solutions in order to find something new to consider, something he had previously missed. He circles but does not repeat, although his work always has an element of geometry; of the constructed and the improvisational; of playing with and adjusting color, tonality, scale, texture, shape--all the vocabulary of a formalist painter in love with process and materials--shadowed by the quasi-narrative element implicit in the piece's making.

The glamorous Light Depth (1969), another draped piece, measures 10 by 75 feet. A kind of soft sculptural relief with swags of varying lavishness, it extended the lengths of two adjacent walls at the Speed, rhythmically, stylishly, breaking free when turning the corner, then hugging the wall again for one more curved length. These works are site-specific and "negotiable," depending upon architectural constraints for their ultimate configuration. Rondo (1971) is another such piece, the canvas in this case held by ropes looped over a ceiling bar, then brought downward and tied around an oak beam leaning diagonally against the wall, appearing to be a tautly balanced system. "It's a fake," Gilliam explains. "It's not really counterweighted, but for me, the interesting thing is just to discover good relationships." "It's an easy language," he says, looking at the nearby Bow Form Construction (1968), a curved drape that resembled the huge grin of the Cheshire cat. "A child could easily do a pirouette because of this."