Object of the Month: "Untitled," 1969, by William T. Williams

Last December, William T. Williams’s large-scale acrylic painting Untitled (1969) entered the BCMA’s collection. This major work by Williams comes to Bowdoin as a donation by halley k harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld in memory of Susan Hamill, who was dedicated to the visual arts both in Maine and nationally. Across the surface of the seven-by-nine-foot canvas, colorful shapes play against a pink background. Untitled is an early work by Williams, an abstract painter who has been active since the 1960s and continues to work today. Untitled originally appeared at the artist’s first solo exhibition in 1971, William T. Williams: One Man Show, at the Reese Palley Gallery in New York City’s Soho neighborhood.¹ In this exhibition, Williams placed his canvases directly next to each other with their edges touching. He also had jazz music playing from a stereo placed in the gallery.² By this point, Williams’s star was already rising, and both the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City had acquired his works.

Following the completion of his Master of Fine Arts (MFA) degree at Yale in 1968, Williams developed what he termed “social color,” which he described as “the ways colors interact in a social and spontaneous way.”³ In this, Williams was departing from other artists’ and instructors’ ideas and theories around color and, in fact, he considers his post-MFA work as a “breaking, a separation point, from many painters around me, and from the language that I had been indoctrinated in.”⁴ He compares his notion of “social color” to the ways in which we encounter color in our everyday lives—two people crossing paths with their different colored shirts—in motion against each other, sometimes at random.⁵ To Williams, colors can take on their own relationships and lives. There are moments in Untitled where the colors seem to be forming a visual symmetry: the royal blue and orange in the upper left corner are repeated in the lower right; lime green is similarly mirrored in the lower left and upper right. Yet there are points where the color placement defies clear reasoning, for instance, in the pink background and singular instances of deep purple and dark teal.

During the period in which Williams created Untitled, he was developing his “ diamond-in-the-box” motif.⁶ In several works, a diamond shape emerges amid a flurry of shapes, stretching out toward the four edges of the picture plane. Williams cites his familiarity with the diamond motif from quilted forms created by women in the communities where he grew up. When one views the painting as a whole, there is indeed a sense of a three-dimensional form emerging from the diamond shape at the center. Still, Williams resists any preconceived notions of materiality or three-dimensionality. Each new encounter with the painting reveals another plane that emerges, another refutation of expectations, another curiosity.

In Untitled, the motif of a diamond bounded inside the rectangle of the canvas conveys a sense of containment. Forms repeat and seem to stack on top of one other; some appear to burst out of others. The shapes form their own sort of ecosystem: they overlap, collide, and disappear into one another. In each corner, a new shape unfolds. These pictorial choices engage in part with the political climate of the late 1960s when Williams was coming of age as an artist. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement, political unrest surrounding racial tensions reached a fervor, especially in urban environments like New York City where Williams was working.⁷ Williams spoke of his work from this time as responding to the surrounding atmosphere, which he characterized as one of “containment” and “suppression.”⁸ Williams states firmly that a connection exists between abstract painting and lived experience: “I’ve said from the very beginning that my work is autobiographical: it speaks to those experiences that I’ve had as a human being but also more specifically as a black human being. The work has always been about that.”⁹

Another immediately striking aspect of Untitled are the clean lines of blank canvas that separate the shapes and establish the work’s visual geometry. As a painter myself, the first thing I thought when looking at this canvas was the meticulous planning that Williams must have been painstakingly undertaken across a large canvas. As far as preparation went, he would doodle on various scraps of paper without a formal plan and would then draw straight onto the canvas. As Williams explained, he achieves his clean edges with “a string and a pencil and a straight-edge.”¹⁰

Williams has worked in acrylic since his senior year as an undergraduate at the Pratt Institute. The medium is also central to his work. Williams’s fascination with paint—its texture, play against surface, even its smell and feeling—was what initially led him into abstraction.¹¹ The acrylic paint gives Untitled a mostly flat surface, except for some areas where the brushstrokes are visible. In one shape in particular, a burnt-sienna triangle extending out of the bottom-left corner, the paint appears to have been thinned, which reveals the surface texture by allowing the brushstrokes and other marks to remain visible. Other works by Williams in this series have a similar flatness and consistency of surface, which is then interrupted by areas of visual texture.

 

Notes:

¹ Eric Booker, “Chronology 1962-78.” In Smokehouse Associates (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 2022), 218.

² BEric Booker, “Smokehouse: Abstract Potential.” In Smokehouse Associates, op. cit., 11.

³ Hans Ulrich Obrist and William T. Williams, “In Conversation: Hans Ulrich Obrist with William T. Williams.” In Things Unknown Paintings, 1968-2017 (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2017), 11.

⁴ Ibid.

⁵ Ibid.

⁶ William T. Williams, “A Diamond in A Box.” By Andy Mundy-Castle. Tate (August 25, 2017), Accessed February 21, 2023, https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/soul-nation-art-age-black-power/diamond-box-william-t-williams.

⁷ Ibid.

⁸ Thelma Golden and William T. Williams, “William T. Williams in Conversation with Thelma Golden.” In Thelma Golden, “William T. Williams in Conversation with Thelma Golden,” 20; Courtney J. Martin and William T. Williams, “A Conversation with William T. Williams and Courtney J. Martin.’ In William T. Williams: Things Unknown, Paintings 1968-2017 (New York: Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, 2017), 12.

⁹ Golden and Williams, 12.

¹⁰ Obrist and Williams, 12

¹¹ Golden and Williams, “William T. Williams in Conversation with Thelma Golden,” 15

Mei Bock, class of 2024
Student Curatorial Assistant
Bowdoin College Museum of Art