Untitled belongs to the last body of work Sam Gilliam made, the large watercolors on Japanese washi that occupied him from about 2019 until his death in June 2022. He worked on two fronts in those years. Alongside the watercolors he made a group of densely worked circular paintings with beveled edges, which the Hirshhorn Museum showed in May 2022 beside Rail, one of his black paintings of 1977. The two late bodies of work pull in opposite directions. The tondos are built up and opaque, heirs to the heavy surfaces of the black paintings. The watercolors are thin and open, and their roots go back further, to the stained and folded work with which Gilliam first made his name.

Gilliam worked in watercolor on Japanese paper from the early 1960s, soon after he moved to Washington, and the paper and the canvases developed in step. In 1967 he began pouring thinned acrylic onto unprimed canvas, folding or crumpling it while wet, and stretching the result over beveled frames that made it seem to float off the wall. A year later he took the canvas off the stretcher and hung it from walls and ceilings as the Drapes. He made the watercolors of those years the same way. A sheet of 1968 in watercolor and acrylic on Japanese paper is already taller than a person and barely a fifth as wide, and a small work of 1969 is recorded simply as watercolor on folded paper. The fold appeared on paper and on canvas in the same years, and the late sheets descend directly from those first folded papers.

The fold mattered because of what it did to the stain. When Gilliam arrived in Washington in 1962, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland had turned Helen Frankenthaler's method of soaking paint into raw canvas into an art of flat, optical color. Clement Greenberg had made flatness a test of modernist painting. Gilliam kept the stain and gave up the flatness. Folding put real depth into the surface and let the material shape the image as much as the hand did. The title of Swing, a Drape of 1969, points to the jazz he played in the studio and to his wish, in his own words, to "just work and let things go." He held to abstraction at a time when many Black artists favored explicit social commentary, and he only rarely tied a work to a public event. April 4, also of 1969, is one such case: its title is the date of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination the year before.

Untitled carries that history in its structure. A crease runs the full height of the sheet a little left of center, leaning from upper right to lower left. Further creases run parallel to it, so that the paper reads as a set of narrow, tilted bands. Indigo and violet fill the central band, with a thread of magenta along the crease. Yellow occupies the bands on either side, rose and red hold the outer edges, and turquoise pools at lower left. Along the central fold, pools of indigo set off by halos of orange and pale yellow recur in near-symmetrical pairs. Toward the bottom the indigo thickens into a dark column that the fold divides in two. Each pair is a kind of monoprint. Pigment on one face of the fold printed onto the other when the wet sheet was closed, and the two impressions separated when it was opened. Gilliam made prints for much of his career, for years with the Washington printer Lou Stovall, and here the fold does the work of the press. Other marks record the drying. Short horizontal ridges cross the right-hand yellow band where the paper cockled, and the red has a feathered border where it wicked along the fibers into the yellow.

The late sheets also reverse the Drapes. In 1968 Gilliam released folded canvas into the room, where its folds could change with each installation. Here the sheet is opened flat and the folds stay in it as fixed structure. They were decided in advance and remain legible on the finished paper, while what the pigment did once the paper closed over it could not be wholly predicted. The jazz analogy had described that balance between a set framework and an unrepeatable result since the 1960s. The paired indigo pools make it visible. A single action made each pair, yet no two halves match, and the eye settles on the differences.

These sheets entered museum collections during Gilliam's lifetime and after it. In 2020 the Menil Collection acquired one made the year before and showed it in 2021 in an exhibition of drawings from its collection. The Museum of Modern Art has two from 2019, at the same scale as this sheet, as promised gifts. In 2024 an anonymous donor gave another 2019 sheet to the Phillips Collection in Washington, the city where Gilliam lived and worked for sixty years. There it joins a stained canvas of 1972 and a silkscreen of 2002 from the collection of Lou Stovall, and the arc from the early stain to the late fold can be followed in one building. The museums catalog these sheets as drawings. That is fair to the medium but not to the method. A Drape hangs in the room like sculpture and is still cataloged as a painting. Untitled lies flat behind glass and is filed as a drawing, though it was stained and folded the way his paintings were.