Clinton Hill. paintings and drawings from the 1960s

Transcription

1 Clinton Hill paintings and drawings from the 1960s

2 Clinton Hill paintings and drawings from the 1960s

3 Art and poetry cannot do without one another. Art the creative or producing, work making activity of the human mind. Poetry not the particular art of writing verses, but a process both more general and more primary; that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human self which is a kind of divination. Poetry in this sense is the secret life of all the arts. Whether art, in its beginnings in mankind, always had some magic purpose is a questionable assumption. But in a deeper though improper sense, art by itself involves a species of magic, which has become purified in the course of centuries, and is pure, and purely aesthetic, when the invasion of man by Nature pertains exclusively to the joy of a vision or intuition, that is, of a purely intentional or supra subjective becoming. Nature is all the more beautiful as it is laden with emotion. Emotion is essential in the perception of beauty. It is an emotion with knowledge; because like the emotion produced by all those signs and that significance with which Nature invaded by man abounds, it constitutes or integrates a delight involved in a vision. Such an emotion transcends mere subjectivity and draws the mind toward things known and toward knowing more, and so induces dream in us. Unexpressed significance, unexpressed meanings, more or less unconsciously putting pressure on the mind, play an important part in an aesthetic feeling and the perception of beauty Clinton Hill,

4 Untitled c. 1960s 51 x 32 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 8 9

5 10 Untitled 50 x 50 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas Collection Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, Oklahoma 11

6 Untitled c. 1960s 68 x 52 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas Collection Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs California 12 13

7 Clinton Hill, Untitled, c. 1960s Brought to Light Clinton Hill s 1960s Paintings and American Art Given his gestural abstract works from the 1950s and studio practice in New York in the 1960s, one could be forgiven the obvious temptation to situate Clinton Hill as a second-generation follower of Abstract Expressionism. In addition, his early interests in linear movement and material explorations, notably paper, also seem to align directly with the group. However, Hill moved to his New York studio at a moment when critics and curators were identifying a new direction in contemporary art practices. In particular, three installations and a book of essays presaged a change from the New York School of abstract expressionism to innovative modes of visual address: Harold Rosenberg s The Anxious Object (1964); Clement Greenberg s Post Painterly Abstraction (1964); Gerald Nordland s Washington Color Painters (); and Kynaston McShine s Primary Structures (1966). At the center of this shift was a debate between Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg regarding the significance and meaning of earlier American postworld war II abstractionists. In the essay accompanying By Daniell Cornell, PhD Opposite page: Clinton Hill, Phoenix, Winter Song, 1958; Allen Tran, Clinton Hill and Mark Rothko, at a gallery opening in New 14 York, c. 1950s. 15

8 Post Painterly Abstraction, his groundbreaking exhibition of 1964, Greenberg posited a distinction between painterly and linear compositions based in the theories of pioneering art historian Heinrich Wölfflin. 1 Although Wölfflin was writing about the change in visual language from the Renaissance to the Baroque, Greenberg found the opposition useful in explaining why abstract colorists were the next logical step in his own theories about modern art based in the exploration of medium specificity. Greenberg, along with Harold Rosenberg, had championed post-world War II American abstract expressionist artists, specifically a group in New York s Greenwich Village, that included Jackson Pollock and Hans Hoffman. According to Greenberg and Rosenberg, this close-knit group of painters repositioned the locus of avant-garde artistic production from Europe to the United States, establishing a new art historical trajectory. However, Greenberg and Rosenberg understood the meaning of this development in radically different ways. Clinton Hill, 4W, c. 1950s; In contrast to Clement Greenberg s formalist assessment of abstract expressionism as an American evolution that emerged out of European art, Harold Rosenberg stressed the existential role of bodily gestures in the work of these artists. He coined the term action painting to suggest an abrupt break, rather than continuity, with previous painting traditions in western art. This emphasis has often led him to be associated with the theoretical underpinnings of conceptual art s happenings and performance works rather 1 Heinrich Wölfflin. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, translated from 7th German Edition (1929) into English by M.D. Hottinger (New York: Dover Publications, 1932). than the avant-garde project of the abstract expressionists known as The New York School 2. In Rosenberg s widely quoted formulation, What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. 3 Greenberg preferred the term painterly abstraction to abstract expressionism and built a compelling body of criticism around the various painting techniques that defined the distinct visual languages of its major artists. However, Greenberg also argued that by the late 1950s, painterly abstraction had devolved into a derivative style, a set of mannerisms characterized by its fashionable use of the long painting gesture to emphasize the flatness of the picture plane. 4 This late period, coinciding with the time Clinton Hill moved back to the west coast, seemed to signal for Greenberg a kind of avant-garde cul-de-sac for America s post world war II abstract expressionists and their canvases of heroic ambition. I. Clement Greenberg and Post Painterly Abstraction Greenberg organized his 1964 exhibition Post Painterly Abstraction to suggest a critical antidote to what he perceived as the devolution of abstract expressionism. In contrast to what he saw 2 In a New Yorker essay written in 1963 while Greenberg was developing his Post Painterly Abstraction exhibition, Rosenberg declared that art could no longer be associated with an art capital, whether Paris, Berlin, or New York, because the avant-garde was now engaged with global concerns: The early-twentieth-century internationalism in art has been dead for thirty years - since the ending of the Paris art movements and the closing down of its capital by the Depression, the War, and the Occupation. 3 Harold Rosenberg, The American Action Painters, Art News 51 (Dec. 1952), p Clement Greenberg, Post Painterly Abstraction (exh. cat.), organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and sponsored by the Contemporary Art Council (Los Angeles: F. Hensen, Co, 1964). as imitative abstract painters recycling the language of The New York School, Greenberg recognized in the post painterly abstract artists an inventive new vocabulary that they were using to unpack the density and agitated look of their predecessors. By shifting from a focus on drawing and gesture to one that favored openness and clarity, this new generation of artists advanced the project of abstraction as a painterly mode. Either through the regularity of geometry or the liquid applications of staining, blotting, and soaking of raw canvas, they created works that do not rely on the artist s deliberate actions but are nevertheless painterly. Greenberg pointed to Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland, in particular, as exemplary of an abstract painting trajectory based in the expressive use of color. John Ferren, Three Rocks, Clinton Hill, much as Newman, juxtaposes large fields of color with passages characterized by defined edges. And like Noland, he begins with an interest in the relationship between color and line explored by the abstract expressionists but finds himself more drawn to the color field members of that group. In fact, he and Noland were contemporaries, born only two years apart (1922 and 1924 respectively) and both died during the first decade of the twenty first century. Noland was undoubtedly prepared for Newman s tightly bounded fields of flat color by his study at Black Mountain College with Ilya Bolotowsky from Then, while 5 Kate Mothes, Kenneth Noland at Black Mountain College, Black Mountain Research, Collaborative Platform. Accessed January 25, at the Contemporary Institute of Art, Washington, DC, he attended the 1950 summer session at the college with Josef Albers, a year that he also would have encountered abstract expressionist teachers Willem and Elaine de Kooning and fellow students Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage. Further, during summer 1950, Clement Greenberg was the resident teacher of art criticism at the college and brought Helen Frankenthaler to visit, planting the seeds of Noland s interest in staining raw canvas. Like the more famous Noland, Clinton Hill shares this constellation of teachers and artists championed by Greenberg, which included Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler. However, for Hill, the exhibition s artists Mark Rothko and John Ferren were even more important. Ferren, one of the few members of the pre-world War II American Abstract Artists group to make the turn to abstract expressionism, experimented with geometry and planes of color in the 1950s, anticipating the works of Frank Stella included in Dorothy Miller s groundbreaking 1959 MoMA exhibition Sixteen American Painters. Although Hill counted Rothko a friend, he indicated that his most important mentor was Ferren, who he studied under while attending the Brooklyn Museum School from It was Ferren who likely suggested to Hill how abstraction, expressionism, geometry, and color could research.com/2014/09/30/kenneth-noland-at-black-mountain-college/ 6 Susan Larsen, Clinton Hill (Rancho Mirage, Ca.: Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, 2011), p

9 cohere within a composition and, as he explained in a 1949 lecture, convey the intuitive the spiritual, mental, social, or psychological forces of life. 7 Although not included among the thirty-one artists in Greenberg s Post Painterly Abstraction exhibit, Clinton Hill s work from the 1960s aligns directly with the artists it identified as belonging to this next evolution of abstract painters. 8 II. Gerald Nordland and Washington Color Painters The artists who Greenberg believed were carrying on America s grand tradition of painterly abstraction were not only in New York. In, a Hellen Frankenthaler, Mountains and Sea, Typescript entitled Address to Advanced Painting Class, Brooklyn Museum Art School, 8 April 1949, Ferren Papers, Archives of American Art, roll N69 98: 143. See aaa.si.edu/collections/john-ferren-papers Accessed February 2, Most likely Hill was not considered for the exhibition due to the fact that from 1956 to 1962 he was living out of the artistic mainstream in family houses in Eugene, Oregon, and Phoenix, Arizona, in order to care for his seriously ill mother. By the time he and his life-long partner Allen Tran were back in New York, in 1963, Greenberg s exhibition choices were probably established. group of artists who formed a loose association centered in Washington DC were the subject of a widely influential exhibition held at the Washington Gallery of Modern Art. Organized by the gallery s director and curator, Gerald Nordland, The Washington Color Painters featured Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Thomas Downing, Howard Mehring, and Paul Reed. Other artists associated with the group include Anne Truitt, Alma Thomas, Leon Berkowitz, and Sam Gilliam. 9 Notably, Louis and Noland were among the artists featured in both Greenberg s and Nordland s exhibits. Louis and Noland had begun their association in 1953 with a New York trip together where Clement Greenberg took them to Helen Frankenthaler s studio. 10 During that visit they viewed her groundbreaking painting Mountains and Sea (1952) and similar works, which introduced them to her technique of staining and blotting on unprimed canvas. 11 Both artists enthusiastically embraced this methodology and along with Frankenthaler made it central to color field painting. Although more a like-minded alliance of local artists than a school, for Nordland, the Washington color field painters all leveraged the discovery of fast-drying acrylic resin to create vibrant hues directly out of a tube. 12 Yet, in addition to an 9 Also in, the now defunct Institute of Contemporary Art mounted Art in Washington, which included the six artists from The Washington Color Painters exhibition but added Leon Berkowitz and Sam Gilliam. Further, several of these artists had been included in Greenberg s 1964 exhibit Post Painterly Abstraction: Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, Gene Davis, Tom Downing, Howard Mehring, and Sam Gilliam. 10 Greenberg had a key to Frankenthaler s studio because he was her lover at the time. Jean Lawlor Cohen, When the Washington Color School earned its stripes on the national stage, The Washington Post, Museums page, June 26, Anne Evenhaugen, Hard-Edged, Bright Color: The Washington Color School. Accessed February 2, Magna was the most heralded and widely used of these new paints, including by Morris Louis, Helen Frankenthaler, and Kenneth Noland. It was developed by Sam Golden in the late 1940s for his uncle Leonard Bocour s paint company. See Oral history interview with Leonard Bocour, 1978 June 8. collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-leonard-bocour Accessed February 2, left: Clinton Hill, 189, ; right: Clinton Hill,185, intense palette, these artists also developed a disciplined rigor in their forms through the use of geometry. An implicit tension exists between the serendipity of stained and blotted paint application and the hard edges of the Kenneth Noland, Bridge, patterns that bring colors into emotional juxtapositions. Louis famously deployed stripes, or Pillars as he called them, of single hues in precisely placed configurations to produce optical vibrations. In these compositions, the areas of unprimed and unpainted canvas interface with individual lines of strong color to organize the painting. Clinton Hill harnesses a similar effect in his paintings from the mid-1960s. Significantly, his acrylic paintings on canvas bring the two principal strategies of post painterly abstraction into an inventive dialogue. On the one hand, he thins his paint and applies it to raw canvas, producing the wash-like effects of color field artists such as Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, who exploited the saturated hues of Magna acrylic paint in their diaphanous compositions. Many of Hill s acrylic paintings convey a similar translucency in the soft, delicately tinted surfaces and feathery edges of his loosely geometric shapes. However, Balancing these more painterly passages are solid geometries with bold hues and hard edges, reminiscent of works by Kenneth Noland and Hill s acknowledged mentor John Ferren. Morris Louis, Pillar of Hope, In 1962, writing about an exhibition of younger artists that included Jasper Johns, Robert Indiana, and Andy Warhol for Dawn Gallery in Los Angeles, Nordland had eschewed the term Pop, preferring to call the artists in the exhibition new patriots who were looking to redefine the idiom of American painting. More 18 19

10 Gene Davis, Boudoir Painting,. focused on their painting techniques than their commercial subject matter, he demonstrates the connections among artists in the mid-1960s who were, along with Hill, exploring the possibilities of deliberate edges and a vibrant palette as a way out of abstract expressionism. 13 Washington Color Painters were also noted for the way they embraced the purely abstract experience of music and integrated it into their compositions. In the mid-1960s, Gene Davis began laying down color against color in linear rows as a reflection of the improvisational experience of jazz, a process he frequently called playing by eye. 14 He saw the vibration of hues in close proximity as akin to the emotional experiences produced by the psychological juxtapositions of notes on which jazz performers rely. Hill, who had a successful singing career, albeit in classical music rather than jazz, mined similar affinities between painted and aural tonalities in his compositions. 15 There is little doubt that Hill shared the group s interest in how to translate the emotional register of music into an abstract visual mode. 13 The full list of artists in the exhibition included John Chamberlain, Charles Frazier, Robert Indiana, Jasper Johns, Edward Kienholz, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, Larry Rivers, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, and Tom Wesselmann. See Gerald Nordland, My Country Tis of Thee (exh. cat.), Los Angeles: Dawn Gallery, November 18 December 15, Davis often compared himself to a jazz musician who plays by ear, describing his approach to painting as playing by eye. Quoted from Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gene Davis. Accessed February 2, See a discussion of the artist s music career in Susan Larsen, Clinton Hill, p. 10. III. Kynaston McShine and Primary Structures By emphasizing the making of a painting rather than anything it might depict, artists in both Greenberg s and Nordland s exhibitions were at the forefront in preparing the way for art to be understood as a material thing in itself rather than a representation of something else. No longer serving to mediate between viewer and phenomenon, the painting itself was the point a luminous, sumptuous, experience to be pondered and savored. Exploiting recent commercial and industrial processes, artists focused on exploring the potential of new materials and techniques to produce self-referential objects. Kynaston McShine s 1966 exhibition at the Jewish Museum, New York, Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors, brought an understanding of painting as object to its ultimate conclusion by conflating it with sculpture. McShine had conceived the exhibition in collaboration with Lucy Lippard, who wrote about their concept in a article titled Third Stream Art. 16 She borrowed the term from jazz, where it references the mixing of genres. In an interview, Lippard recalls that they were interested in painting become sculpture, painted sculpture, and through the mess the transition between 2- and 3-D, which became Minimalism. 17 In his legendary exhibition of forty-two mostly emerging artists, McShine effectively dissolved any distinction between the geometric forms on painted canvas and the solid shapes of three-dimensional volumes. In a manner similar to the way color field painters abandoned expressive 16 Lucy Lippard, Third Stream Art: Painted Structures and Structured Paintings, Art Voices 4,. 17 Quoted in Sue Heinemann, Oral history interview with Lucy Lippard, March 15, #transcript. Accessed February 2, gesture, many of these sculptors removed the evidence of their making by employing smooth, shiny industrial materials and processes. By employing technologies used in manufacturing, many of these artists also removed the traditional expressive mark of their hand. Further dismantling the usual distinctions between sculpture and painting, at times these structures were mounted on the wall, as in Robert Smithson s Cryospheres (1966), or presented as flat, freestanding shaped canvases, as in Ellsworth Kelly s Blue Disc (1963). Even more radical still, they were identified with the architecture itself, as in Carl Andre s Lever (1966), a row of fired bricks laid out on the floor. Similarly, built out of wood, fiberglass and lacquer, John McCracken s Manchu () and Northumberland () were freestanding, walls whose highly reflective surfaces mirrored the room both literally and figuratively. Richard Artswager s Table with Pink Tablecloth (1964) took the collapsing of sculpture, painting, design, and architectural space to it s logical extreme by mapping the solid and negative volumes of an ostensible piece of furniture onto a non-functional cube. By calling them structures rather than sculptures, McShine emphasized the reductive quality of the works, replacing visual perception with an architectural experience of space organized around the viewing body. In his essay for the exhibition, McShine explains the implications of this shift: These structures are also conceived as objects, abstract, directly experienced, highly simplified and Clockwise from top left: John McCracken, Blue Block in Three Parts, 1966; Richard Artschwager, Table With Pink Tablcloth, 1964.: Clinton Hill, 29,. self-contained. There is no overt surrealistic content and the anthropomorphic is rejected. Shape, color and material have a physical concreteness and unity. Generally, bright and vibrant color is in evidence, and when color is not applied, the intrinsic color of the sculptural material asserts itself. 18 Although this understanding of art s function was novel at the time, the basic elements McShine identifies are now generally accepted as the definition of minimalism, one of contemporary art s most important movements. It also aligns with the principles that Greenberg and Nordland set forth in organizing their respective exhibitions of 1964 and. 18 Kynaston McShine, Primary Structures, The Jewish Museum. thejewishmuseum.org/1966/about. Accessed February 2,

11 7 7 7 While Clinton Hill s 1960s paintings are traditional stretched canvases hung on the wall, they evince the concerns of minimalism that were given focus in all three of these exhibitions from the mid-1960s. Hill s works are reduced to elemental components through the use of simplified forms, geometric structures, affective colors, economic means, and material focus. The fifty-two extent paintings that exist from the period also have the serial character that is now considered a standard trope of minimalism. Working in series, Hill experimented with translucent fields or luminous layers juxtaposed against more geometric forms. He also incorporated open areas of unprimed canvas, bringing the painted passages and material substrate into direct dialogue. Whereas his friend Mark Rothko filled his paintings with strata of glowing hues that filled the entire canvas, Hill explored the psychological effects of subtle tonal shifts, often incorporating both glaze-like washes and solid passages of pigment into the same composition. In organizing the arrangement of forms in his 1960s paintings, Hill alternated between symmetrical and asymmetrical layouts. However, even the asymmetrical works often feel as if they are the left or right half of an unseen but more balanced diptych. Indeed, it is this impulse to look for a dynamic stasis within the formal elements of his compositions that best characterizes Hill s paintings from the mid-1960s. He brings the concerns of color field, hardedge, and minimal practices into productive exchange through his radiantly vivid use of pigment and its various applications. Without emphasizing his own expressive gestures, Hill creates paintings that convey the psychological impact of color and form that helped to move American abstract art into the modes we now recognize as the beginning of a new era. Copyright 2018, Daniell Cornell, PhD Daniell Cornell, PhD, is an independent arts professional, cultural historian, curator, and educator with a focus on theories of representation, politics, gender and sexuality. He has held positions at the New Museum in New York, Morgan Library, and Yale University Art Gallery. At the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco he was director of contemporary art projects and most recently was director of art at Palm Springs Art Museum. Mark Rothko, Untitled (No. 17), 1961 Clinton Hill, Untitled, c. 1960s

12 Paintings from the 1960s Clinton Hill s handsome and incredibly complete body of work from the 1960s has recently come to light. Pursuing a strongly geometric vision, Hill sought to endow it with the sensations of speed and motion. He introduced dramatic counterweights, spatial shifts and sharp contrasts of light and color. Grasped all-at-once, they have the graphic strength and coloristic impact typical of the best American art of the 1960s. Some of this work suggests the feeling of running toward a distant place while adjusting for the uneven surfaces of the earth. In others, we soar into a colored ether while remaining conscious of and related to the central axis of our planet. Others have a prescient quietude, a sensation of slowly unfolding like the leaves of a plant in spring or the wings of a juvenile moth. Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D. Clinton Hill: 50 Year Survey. Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, Rancho Mirage, 2009 Hill had developed an attitude to drawing that is implicitly bent on achieving a use of line that will render it both directional (but not descriptive of volume) and planar -- i.e., frontal and, in that sense, not in motion across or through the pictorial surface or space at all. Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe. Clinton Hill Art Forum, September,

13 26 Untiled c. 1960s x 53.5 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 27

14 28 Unititled c.1960s 68 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 29

15 30 Untitled 53.5 x 48 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 31

16 32 Untitled x 47.5 in. (127 x cm) Acrylic on canvas 33

17 Clinton Hill had dear friends among the artists of the Fluxus movement. Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrich and George Maciunas kept up a lively correspondence and often used Hill s New York loft as a home-away-from-home. Their love for fragile yet enduring works on paper found a place in Clinton Hill s life and art. Yet he was not one of them. Despite his enjoyment of discovery and surprise, Hill created a very complete, elegantly wrought and satisfying body of work that stands on its own as an artistic statement from a highly individual voice. Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D. Clinton Hill: 50 Year Survey. Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, Rancho Mirage, 2009 Postcard from Jay DeFeo to Clintin Hill, Clinton Hill on the balcony of his New York Apartment, c. 1960s -1970s

18 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 37

19 38 Arihue x 56 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 39

20 40 Untitled x 48.5 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 41

21 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 43

22 44 31A x 68 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 45

23 Untitled x in. (125.1 x cm) Acrylic on canvas 46 47

24 48 Untitled x 33 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 49

25 Clinton Hill s work of the 1960s is so disciplined, continuous and clear that it must have had an intellectual component. He was teaching at the The City University of New York and was responsible for his students artistic and intellectual development as well as his own. Hill s sketchbooks contain passages descriptive of his swift-moving colored geometry of the 1960s. He outlines three states of balance: axial, radial and occult. [...] Clinton Hill s artistic career would continue to prosper for fifty years from the mid-1950s to 2003, propelled by his need for continuous action and episodic change. Intelligent critics would always find the continuity in his work, in his richly intense color, in Hill s deft exploration materials. A passionate colorist, his work would always be beautiful. But his restless curiosity would draw into the work a world of disparate materials: paper, wood, fragments found on the street, printed surfaces, plastics, letters, numbers, names of places, records and memories all offering invitations to explore anew. Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D. Clinton Hill: 50 Year Survey. Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, Rancho Mirage, 2009 Clockwise from top left: Arihue (pictured on page 37) at American Embassy in Mexico City, c. 1970s; Show notes for Handmade Paper at Museum of Modern Art, 1976; Clinton 50 Hill in his studio,

26 52 Untitled c. 1960s 68 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 53

27 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 55

28 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 57

29 x 51.5 in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 59

30 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 61

31 x in. ( x cm) Acrylic on canvas 63

32 Moving, fluid, always aware of time passing into memory, his art focused upon the actions of his human hand as the artist teased form out of seemingly fragile and complete surfaces. Following on the generation of boldly expansive action painters, Hill espoused patient observation and an attentive, sometimes playful interaction with his materials and his environment. [...] Clinton Hill s paintings and constructed works on paper of the 1960s have a dynamism, an exquisite technical virtuosity and originality that adds another voice to the minimalist materiality of that era. His travel paintings and beautiful drawings reflect the warm human being we loved during his lifetime. We are getting to know the full range of Hill s achievement and we are moved and astonished by its depth and consequence. Drawings from Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D. Clinton Hill: 50 Year Survey. Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, Rancho Mirage, 2009 The speedy tracks built into the canvases and paperworks of Clinton Hill are the marks of a sensibility conditioned by uncramped spaces and movement across them. Despite twenty-five years in New York, Hill s stride, the distance in his blue eyes, and his open manner evoke the West. Raised on a ranch in Idaho, he was accustomed early in life to covering distances on horseback, riding the fences to check their condition, and inspecting waterholes. the 1960s Martica Sawin. Clinton Hill: Paintings and Paperworks, Montclair Art Museum, Montclair,

33 x 12 in. (30.48 x cm) x 14 in. (41.91 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) 67

34 x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) 69

35 x 12 in. (36.83 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) 71

36 x in. (50.8 x cm) x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) 73

37 x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) x 17.5 in. (57.15 x cm) 75

38 x 12 in. (30.48 x cm) x in. (50.8 x cm) x 15 in. (46.99 x 38.1 cm) 77

39 x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) x 12 in. (30.48 x cm) x 14 in. (48.9 x cm) x 12 in. (30.48 x cm) 79

40 x 12 in. (30.48 x cm) Study for untitled painting pictured on page 7. 81

41 By 1944, at the climax of World War II, Clinton Hill was serving as commander of a submarine chaser in the south Pacific. With hundreds of sailors under his watch, Hill and his men patrolled the Pacific hunting enemy submarines. They mapped mine fields and traveled to remote islands. Hill s ship went to Shanghai as soon as the surrender was signed and his men liberated Chinese prisoners of war while tending to civilians as well. All of this required the technical skills he had acquired in school but most of all, demanded human understanding and his ability to maintain the health and morale of his men in the midst of unspeakable horror. Surviving photographs show Clinton Hill in full officer dress on the deck of his ship surrounded by an orderly cadre of sailors who survived the war unscathed. Among the enlisted men was Allen Tran who would become Clinton s beloved partner for the next fifty years. Susan C. Larsen, Ph. D. Clinton Hill: 50 Year Survey. Clinton Hill / Allen Tran Foundation, Rancho Mirage, 2009 Clockwise from top left: Clinton Hill c. 1950s; Clinton Hill at gallery opening in Paris, c. 1950s; Clinton Hill and Allen Tran; Clinton Hill in his Navy uniform, c.1940s; Clinton Hill and Allen Tran in NY 82 83

42 Selected Collections Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, AR Bradbury Gallery at AR State University, Jonesboro, AR Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY National Academy of Design, New York, NY Hickory Museum of Art, Hickory, NC New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ Georgia Museum of Art, Athens, GA New York Public Library, Miriam And Ira D. Wallach Print Collection, New York, NY Queens College Godwin-Ternbach Museum, New York, NY Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK Port Authority, City of New York Jule Collins Smith Museum of Fine Art at Auburn University, Auburn, AL Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA British Museum, London, UK The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, CA Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC National Gallery of Australia, Canberra Brooklyn Museum of Art, Brooklyn, NY Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL For information about Clinton Hill, visit For information about the estate of Clinton Hill, contact Royale Projects at Text on pages Copyright 2018 Daniell Cornell, PhD. 84 Graphic Design by Tiffany Phelan. 85

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