Clifford Gleason: The Promise of Paint by Roger Hull (review)

Once again Roger Hull and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art have published an essential building block for constructing a more complete and comprehensive history of visual arts in Oregon during the modern period. Attractively designed to privilege the artworks, Clifford Gleason: The Promise of Paint was published in conjunction with an exhibition at the museum of the artist's paintings and drawings, and it provides the first scholarly, researched biography and exhibition history of the artist in print. This beautiful book succeeds in documenting the trajectory of Gleason's artistic evolution from precocious student to committed professional artist. It also identifies the individuals and institutions who assisted and validated his considerable talent and illuminates some of the artist's financial and emotional struggles, including the impact on Gleason of the period's society-wide persecution of homosexuals.

Considered an "artist's artist" for his independent aesthetic and painterly prowess, Oregon-born Clifford Gleason (1913–1978) was a life-long resident whose forty-year painting career evolved from European modernism to a highly personal American abstract expressionism in the solitude of his successive studio situations in Salem and Portland; that evolution is handsomely evident in the volume's elegantly reproduced and sequenced artworks. Gleason earned early institutional support for his work from the Portland Art Museum and enjoyed successive representation throughout his career in the regional commercial galleries of the period. Hull gives graceful shape to the family and community the artist grew up in and to Gleason's early discovery of his life's passion in painting. The clearly written text illuminates the artist's development decade to decade, marching along without needlessly encumbering arcane art language, and is accompanied by wellselected historical photographs, paintings, and the commentary of Gleason's friends, patrons, and associates. Hull's skill in creating a portrait of the artist is grounded in deep research into public and private archives and the use of previously unpublished material, including a host of fresh interviews of surviving individuals who knew the artist in varied circumstances.

One regrets that the fine Sources and Resources chapter does not include a traditional exhibition history that organizes a chronological summary of the artist's public and commercial exhibitions cited in the research notes. A concise exhibition history, preliminary as the reconstruction may be, would be another tool in understanding this neglected artist's actual career path. Similarly, given the rich discussion of the paintings, this reader notes that the discussions of Gleason's personal life — homosexuality and alcohol — are flawed by quotes from archival materials and interviews that reveal the heteronormative assumptions and anti-homosexual biases of the day. Unacknowledged and unchallenged, these sources distort and weaken the portrait drawn of the artist. It will be up to another generation of scholars to take on the untangling of those prejudices, evident even among Gleason's closest advocates, to bring forward a more balanced, fulsome understanding of the man, his life, and his important contribution to the art of Oregon.