Featured Painting by Neil Williams |
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Mock Match (Paris Series)
by Neil Williams (1934-1988)
The work of Neil Williams, as it was noted in a recent compendium of twentieth-century American abstract art “occupies a specific place in the adventure of the shaped canvas by virtue of the artist’s passionate approach to geometry and color.”1 Yet, Williams’s reclusive life, move to Brazil in 1982, and premature death six years later at the age of 48, has left his work little known to the public and to scholars alike. Nonetheless, he was a pioneering and important figure in one of the most significant developments within late twentieth-century painting. Where he belongs is among the group of painters who created shaped canvases beginning in the early 1960s as a way of reducing painting to the essentials of its nature, ridding it of the personal involvement of the artist and the spatial illusionism that had remained within Abstract Expressionist art, yet retaining its identity as “painting.”
The creators of these works built on the basis of a group of paintings created in the early 1950s by Barnett Newman, consisting of tall, thin canvases that were planes of color rather than lines or stripes. Another precedent was the emergent art of Jasper Johns, who broke new ground in the mid-1950s by identifying his images, such as flags and targets, with the entire pictorial field. Treating their surfaces as flat planes in which color and image were indistinguishable, Williams and a group of his peers sought to preserve painting from an onslaught in which, on the one hand, painting seemed to be losing its boundaries, merging with sculpture and architecture, and on the other, in earlier art, appearing false and antiquated in its portrayal of a fictive illustration of space. The leading creators of shaped canvases were identified by the noted curator and critic Lawrence Alloway, who organized a landmark exhibition entitled The Shaped Canvas, that was held at the Guggenheim Museum in December 1964. The artists included were Paul Feeley, Sven Lukin, Richard Smith, Frank Stella, and Williams. Williams was also included, along with Larry Bell, Charles Hinman, and Will Insley in an exhibition entitled Shape and Structure held at the Tibor de Nagy gallery in January of 1965. In the fall of 1965, the art of Williams, Hinman, and Larry Poons were the subject of a show at the Allen Memorial Art Gallery at Oberlin College, Ohio, the anticipation of which prompted an important article on the artists entitled “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” by Ellen Johnson that appeared in Artnews in the summer of 1965.2 Williams’s Mock Match (Paris Series) was reproduced as the article’s first illustration, encapsulating the spirit of the new art.
Johnson began her discussion by linking shaped canvases with a historical trajectory, writing:
Illusions of space and motion through color, and the deliberate ambiguity of contradictions between space, volume, and plane relations characteristic of Cubism and most abstract painting, go back at least to Cézanne and the Impressionists. For Cézanne, color was a primary instrument to evoke and, at the same time, to deny space and volume; and in the “deliberate” Impressionism of Seurat and the “instinctive” Impressionism (to use Signac’s terms) of Monet and the others, the potentially kinetic power of color was explored and engaged. Thus the new abstraction, represented in these pages by the work of Charles Hinman, Larry Poons, and Neil Williams, has roots firmly planted in the continuities of modern art. 3
Placing the artists along this continuum, Johnson went on to discuss how they used the medium of painting to move into real space, rejecting behind-the-frame illusionism. Focusing on Williams, she wrote: “Where Larry Poons achieves this effect of moving space on the traditionally shaped canvas (he earlier used other forms), Neil Williams, for comparable effects, relies in part on the directional thrusts engendered in the multi-edged canvas.”4 She traced Williams’s development beginning in the spring of 1963 with works such as Pesa Mignon (1963, private collection), in which he painted parallelograms that read interchangeably as ground and figure, forward and back, to works he created in the fall of the year, such as Albatross (1963, location unknown), his first multi-edged picture, in which he painted parallelograms in deep ocher-orange and magenta that were connected and separated by bits of green. Williams included the shadows cast by the jagged edges as part of his images.
Williams’s next endeavor consisted of his Paris Series, to which Mock Match belongs. Johnson noted that the series was given this name simply because Williams was creating the works that belong to it in anticipation of an exhibition of his art to be held in Paris in the fall of 1965. Johnson describes the works in the series including Mock Match as resembling “surfaces of colored blocks colliding and multiplying themselves like particles of energy.”5 Noting Williams’s interests in the philosophies of mathematics and physics, Johnson wrote that Williams derived the idea for his first shaped canvas while reading an essay by the German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg on philosophical problems in atomic physics. In the essay, Heisenberg wrote: “All elementary particles are composed of the same substance, that is, energy. They are the various forms that energy must assume in order to become matter . . . Energy is not only the force that keeps the ‘all’ in continuous motion, it is also . . . the fundamental substance of which the world is made.” Williams was also influenced by Heisenberg’s reference to scission, a view that “Sometimes a great many particles originate in such a collision, and surprisingly and paradoxically the particles that originate in the collision are no smaller than the elementary particles that were being broken up. They are themselves again elementary particles.”6
It is unknown the degree to which Williams applied the ideas of Heisenberg to his work, yet in works such as Mock Match, the artist’s interest was clearly in exploring a sense of continuous movement and the splitting of parts. Using fluorescent oil-base enamel, his flat planes of opaque color suggest the illusion of interpenetrating polyhedrons, as some of the shapes appear to recede while others advance. At the same time, the white lines, their width modulated to vary the speed of the planes they contour, remind us of the work’s flatness and surface structure. Johnson notes that these ambiguities of surface and depth “are as old as Cubism; but Williams has constructed a personal imagery within a common tradition.”7 In Mock Match, the lines that define the forms are also the edges of the work, so that the structure of the painting consists both of its edges and the planes of color within. At once, geometric and flexible, Mock Match takes spatial illusionism out of a fictive construction, bringing it into a literal context. While marking a critical historical moment, the work remains vital, fresh, and dynamic today.
LNP
©The essay herein is the property of Spanierman Gallery LLC and is copyrighted by Spanierman Gallery LLC and may not be reproduced in whole or in part, without written permission from Spanierman Gallery LLC nor shown or communicated to anyone without due credit being given to Spanierman Gallery LLC.
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1. Claudine Humblet, The New American Abstraction, 1950-1970 (Milano, Italy: Skira Editore, 2007), col. 2, 1087.
2. Ellen H. Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” Artnews 64 (Summer 1965), 43-44, 62-65. .
3. Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” 43.
4. Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” 44.
5. Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” 44.
6. Quoted in Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” 44.
7. Johnson, “Three New, Cool, Bright Imagists,” 62.
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