Acrylic on canvas, 1966. 2032x2032 mm; 80x80 inches. Signed, titled and dated in ink, upper margin verso.
Provenance: acquired directly from the artist; private collection; private Atlanta collection.
Tumble II is a monumental early work by Sam Gilliam--one of the last of his Color Field paintings before the transition to his signature stained canvases. This large abstraction is also only the second, and the largest, of his Color School paintings to ever come to auction.
Sam Gilliam was one of the youngest members of the Washington, DC Color School that included such established painters as Richard Dempsey, Delilah Pierce and Alma Thomas. He showed his geometric hard-edged work at the leading contemporary space in Washington, DC at the time, the Jefferson Place Gallery on Capitol Hill. Tumble II is closely related in its composition to Shoot Six, 1965, in the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, and Eikos, 1966, in the collection of Howard University. It also just predates Paleo, the first painting in 1966 that the artist "removed the tape when the paint was wet and allowed the different colors and shapes to bleed into each other." Gilliam never returned to hard-edge color painting after that, and by 1967, the canvases were also completely constructed off the stretcher bars. Binstock p. 20.
