ABSTRACT
This chapter will primarily focus on Sam Gilliam’s Drape paintings with respect to the artistic milieu within which they were produced and, in some respects, remained antagonistic towards. To this end, Painting into Sculpture will consider the relationship between his expanded approach to painting and formalist abstraction. Rather than a continuation of the latter by other means, Gilliam’s Drape paintings, it will be argued, are to be understood as a negotiation with, if not direct rebuttal of Greenberg’s ideas. With the production of his Drape paintings which he had begun in 1968, Gilliam was keen to explore and, indeed, exploit painting’s incursion into the realms of actual, three-dimensional space, a space that historically sculpture had inhabited. Given the proclivity for the Drape paintings to function between or across categorical disciplines, this chapter will examine the implications these works held for the future direction of painting in the US, c. 1968.
