TitleTriad VI
Artist
Clinton Adams
(American, 1918 - 2002)
Date1980
MediumColor lithograph on off-white German Etching paper
DimensionsSheet size: 29 1/2 × 21 7/16 in.
Image size: 27 3/8 × 19 5/8 in.
Mat size: 36 × 28 in.
Edition12/12
SignedSigned in graphite at LR: "Clinton Adams '80"
MarkingsTamarind blindstamp at BLC; printer's blindstamp at BRC.
SubmissionNA diploma presentation, September 16, 1992
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1992.21
Label TextBorn in Glendale, California, Clinton Adams was a prolific painter and printmaker for more than fifty years and in 1960 served as the inaugural associate director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. Adams initially studied at Glendale Junior College before enrolling in the art department at the University of California, Los Angeles during the 1930s. The curriculum at UCLA at the time was traditional and based essentially on the teachings of Arthur Wesley Dow. Its persistent conservatism, even after Adams became a professor there, was recalled in an interview with Van Deren Coke: "At that point in time the UCLA art department emphasized the still life, and a rather traditional, representational kind of drawing. I think all of us on the faculty then believed very strongly in that kind of discipline. The Abstract Expressionist movement was very strong elsewhere. The Berkeley department, for example, was involved with almost nothing but Abstract Expressionist ideas. The UCLA department, by comparison, seemed quite conservative." Adams served within an Engineer Camouflage Battalion during World War II and was stationed for a time at Mitchel Air Force Base, Long Island. In his spare time he would make regular trips into New York City where he saw the work of Stuart Davis and the Precisionists. These encounters had an immediate and lasting effect on his paintings and would soon be influential on his prints as well. After the war he returned to UCLA in 1946 to teach in the art department. In 1950, Adams met Lynton Kistler, who introduced him to the technique of lithography, and by 1960 he was hired to oversee operations at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop. After accepting a teaching position at the University of New Mexico the following year, Adams brought the Tamarind Workshop there permanently in 1970. He would go on to oversee the (renamed) Tamarind Institute until his retirement and co-authored The Tamarind Book of Lithography: Art & Techniques with Tamarind's first master printer and technical director, Garo Antreasian, NA.
When Adams began producing lithographs in the late 1940s, they were semi-abstract prints that were primarily cubist-inspired. By 1960 he developed a technique of applying a tusche wash to the lithography stone. This allowed him to incorporate a gestural variation of abstraction that combined elements of Abstract Expressionism with more geometric forms. By the end of the 1960s, Adams had abandoned the expressive painterly gestures in favor of simplified geometric shapes that echoed the primary forms of Minimalism. The "Venus" series was one of his earliest to utilize this geometric vocabulary, and out of it grew the "Triad" series to which this print belongs. The work is nearly identical to the painting "Triad IV" (1980, Albuquerque Museum), and, as in other works from the series, Adams uses a limited palette of colors within a composition of a broken triangle.
