Bitumen

1986

Terry Winters

Artist, American, born 1949

Six rounded and clustered organic shapes in shades of gray and beige stand out against a textured, mostly russet-brown background in this horizontal abstract painting. A strip up the left fifth of the painting has a lighter, eggshell-white background with seven cell-like, dark gray shapes spaced along its height. In the larger area to the right, the formation closest to the top of the painting is a spiral made up of bone-white pouches or ovals. A smaller gray form like those in the strip to the left floats next to this spiral. Moving down and to the right is a long, loaf-shaped form made up of more white pouches or cells. Below that is a wreath-like cluster of ash-brown, cup-like forms. Now moving left along the bottom of the composition are a caterpillar-like shape made of four dark gray ovals and, finally, an oval made of what appears to be parchment-brown kernels or scales.

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One of the leading artists of the post–Johns/Rauschenberg generation, Terry Winters wields his brush with a knowledge and conviction that make periodic talk of the death of painting seem empty. Bitumen, 1986, is a work from the first decade of his career—when Winters was exploring such basic natural processes as crystal formation, fungal growth, and (as in this canvas) cellular division, and when he was equally immersed in the natural history of painting itself.

Winters' training at the High School of Art and Design in Manhattan and then at Pratt Institute (class of 1971) left him curious about his medium, and he began grinding and making his own paints. Attracted to bitumen, which is made from coal tar, but aware that its use was responsible for the poor condition of many 19th-century paintings, he obtained a stable, modified version from the French firm Lefranc & Bourgeois. On full display in this painting (one of four named for pigments) is what Winters calls the "transparency and viscosity" of bitumen, which he extended with umbers and other earth colors. Thick, juicy modeling alternates with passages of almost aqueous translucency. The material itself seems to partake of the painting's theme of organic growth, which is appropriate given the carbon basis of the titular pigment. The tabular array of the composition, on the other hand, with its forms laid out like specimens on a table, recalls the rational ordering schemes of the naturalist as well as the splayed compositions of Johns and the later Guston. Thus the painting enacts a meeting of nature and culture that is at the heart of Winters' work.

Since 1990 Winters has turned his gaze from organic motifs to the digital presentation of graphic information (including weather maps, architectural plans, and statistical charts), appropriating and overlaying imagery to drive his interrelated practices of painting, drawing, and printmaking. In this respect he was one of the first painters to embrace cyberspace and postmodern information theory. Winters has held fast to traditional artistic media as the appropriate vehicle for these explorations, thus extending the viability and the possibilities of painting.


Artwork overview

  • Medium

    oil on linen

  • Credit Line

    Richard S. Zeisler Fund

  • Dimensions

    overall: 224 x 305 cm (88 3/16 x 120 1/16 in.)

  • Accession

    2008.35.1


Artwork history & notes

Provenance

The artist; purchased June 2008 through (Matthew Marks Gallery, New York) by NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1987

  • The Fortieth Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1987.

1991

  • Terry Winters, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1991-1992.

Bibliography

1987

  • Carlson, Prudence. "Terry Winters." Galleries Magazine 18 (April/May 1987): 78.

1998

  • Juncosa, Enrique and Ronald Jones. Terry Winters. Valencia and London, 1998: 83.

2004

  • Shiff, Richard. Terry Winters: 1981-1986, New York, 2004: pl. 37.

2008

  • Cooper, Harry. "Terry Winters, Bitumen." National Gallery of Art Bulletin no. 39 (Fall 2008): 25-27, repro.

Wikidata ID

Q20197925


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