Grand Lobby Installation by Charles Clough
Charlotta Kotik
The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York (by the author’s permission)
December 1985—February 1986

(Charlotta Kotik is the curator of contemporary art at The Brooklyn Museum.) Three mural-size paintings by Charles Clough will be on display in the Grand Lobby from December
13 to February 24. The installation is appropriately called Three Paintings for One Wall, as the three
works to be exhibited were created for this particular large space; all three are based on Clough’s
careful study of The Brooklyn Museum’s remarkable collection of 19th and 20th-century American
paintings.
The largest of the three works, called The Governor—which measures roughly 14 by 22 feet—was
inspired by Albert Bierstadt’s A Storm in the Rocky Mountains?Mt. Rosalie of 1866. Clough’s
painting, like Bierstadt’s, employs a compositional scheme of a mass of brown hues on the right, the
deep blue of the sky in the central part, and luminous areas of ochers and greens on the left. The two
other works are both vertical and are half the size of The Governor. Doubloon was inspired by
Benjamin West’s The Angel of the Lord Announcing the Resurrection, while Oysters draws freely
from several works by Childe Hassam and John Henry Twachtman. All three works show Clough’s
brilliant handling of colors, his gestural painting technique, and his recent interest in mastering a
large-scale format.
Clough began doing large-scale works in the late 1970s but lost interest by the early 1980s when he
became engrossed in the idea of appropriating images and ideas from artists of the past. This resulted
in a reduction of scale, because his method of working utilized photographs and reproductions from
books and periodicals, which were all limited in size. These were overpainted and then photographed,
and the resulting large prints were overpainted again. By 1984 he felt too constrained by the
limitations of scale and content imposed by this method of working and decided that he had exhausted
its creative possibilities. He began to concentrate more on free studies of his favorite masters,
especially Hans Hofmann and Henri Matisse, but without drawing on specific works for inspiration.
His interest in large-scale work once again came to the fore, and he devised new tools that enabled
him to work on an even larger scale than before. Clough’s concern was to find ways to express his
obsession with gesture and the physical properties of paint and to become immersed in the
illusionistic space of the painting. The inherent romanticism of Clough’s work became readily
apparent. His interest in large scale work was reinforced during a trip to France in 1984, when he
discovered at first hand the monumentality of Rubens, Courbet and Delacroix.
“I do not reveal new unknown thoughts but continue the revelation of something which was an
inspiration for myself” is Clough’s own assessment of his approach to art. By deconstructing and
altering already existing imagery and reassigning it to another context, Clough reveals new qualities
inherent in the original works while at the same time creating his own commentary on them. The
initial impulse for the new work is transformed by the complex process of the interplay between
Clough’s thought and his working method, proving that the choice of temporary dependence is the
first step toward developing an independent identity.