Clinton Hill

This exhibition presented the works of a multitalented artist who was a Renaissance man of the abstract. Neither cubist, futurist, minimalist, abstractionist or constructivist, he was all at once. It constituted a survey of his career, from printmaker to painter, from pulp-paper pioneer to lyrical wall constructions. He tried to marry plane and solid geometry through surface texture and color harmonies and was a determined abstractionist. If necessary, he shaved paper to give the illusion of absence or added paper pulp to produce ribbonlike curves, rigorous line and suggestive arcs. Hill’s biographer Susan Larsen referred to his “effortless fluency” of craft, from which his distinctive visual vocabulary takes voice and which the works on view demonstrate. The museum published a fully illustrated book with a unique design to accompany the exhibition, with an essay by William U. Eiland.