‘White is the most ordinary of colours, it is also the most extraordinary; it is the absence of colour, it is also the sum of colours; it is the most majestic of colours, it is also the most common; it is the colour of tranquillity, it is also the colour of grief.’
Richard Lin, an artist who was born and raised in Taiwan but who worked and was educated in Europe, produced canvases that set the Eastern aesthetic theory of his birth-place in dialogue with contemporary European and American abstract movements of the time. He harnesses within his compositions this unique combination of East and West, ancient and modern. Through such cross-cultural works, he has produced deeply contemplative paintings, which have won critical acclaim from the international art world.
Born in Taichung, Taiwan, and brought up to be the heir to Wufeng Lin’s fortune - one of the most influential families in the country, Lin was sent to the UK to be educated and to the disbelief of his family, he renounced his inheritance to become an artist. Having studied architecture at Regent St Polytechnic by day and painting by night, once he graduated in 1958, he turned to painting full-time. The quality of his work was noticed by the Gimpel Fils Gallery who began to represent him the same year and the ICA gave him a solo exhibition. Soon this recognition was international: he received an award at the 'Chinese Modern Sculpture Exhibition' organized by Taipei Fine Arts Museum and, in 1964, he was invited to participate in Documenta 3 in Kassel, Germany, becoming the first Chinese artist to take part in the prestigious exhibition. In 1967 Lin was chosen to participate in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh, and along with Francis Bacon was awarded the William Frew Memorial Purchase Award.
‘Abstraction comes from the English term, Abstract, which focuses on removing all unnecessary things. Existence is ultimately “nothing.”’
Lin’s began painting semi-abstract landscape paintings in early 1950s, but by the time Painted Relief with Aluminum Square was painted in 1960, he had already formalized the stylistic elements and minimalist geometric abstractionism for which his work become known. The precise use of line, form and colour against a white background, often with collaged or painted relief elements, created canvases with delicate shifts in colour, multiple dimensions and tactile spaces. In the present work, the addition of the aluminum square relief, as well as the lines of a variety of thicknesses, results in a composition of geometric restraint, in which the spatial layering is not just a cleverly constructed illusion, but physically felt, and as such Lin reminds us of the objective existence of the canvas. Lin’s precision in executing his work allows him to express spatial effects that exemplify the spirit of Eastern philosophy in which form and emptiness each generate the other, like yin and yang. These Taoist concepts inform his works but from a Western art historical perspective. In 1970, at a solo exhibition in Belgium, Lin confirmed his paintings were deeply rooted in Eastern culture and particularly the ancient tradition of calligraphy in which he had been trained as a child.
The present work was purchased in the year it was painted from Gimpel Fils by Thomas Baker Slick, Jr, (1916-1962), a legendary philanthropist, businessman and cultural figure of San Antonio. Born in Clarion Pennsylvania in 1916, Tom grew up with oil as his heritage. Slick’s father, after whom he was named, was an oil tycoon who made a historic find in the Cushing Field and who was known as ‘Lucky Tom or ‘King of the Wildcatters.’ His mother Berenice was a true frontierswoman and would cart baby Tom from oil field to oil field alongside her husband.
‘I know Thomas Baker Slick, Jr., as an uncle; others knew him as a millionaire wildcatter and explorer who drilled for oil and found it, searched for the Yeti in Nepal, spied for the OSS in World War II, discovered diamonds in the Amazon Basin, developed the Brangus breed of cattle and the liftslab method of construction, established five major research institutes (the first when he was just twenty-five years old), wrote two books on world peace, and died a mysterious death at age forty-six.’
Following his studies Tom went into business, and like his father very successfully drilled for oil, but he also invested in cattle and was particularly interested in experimental breeding techniques, mining, manufacturing, construction and dabbled in the airline business with his brother Earl. A passionate traveller and explorer of world cultures, Slick was particularly fascinated by India and he made his first of several visits to the country in 1955. It was on a trip through the Himalayan foothills that he first heard about the ‘Abominable Snowman.’ He led an expedition into the Himalayans in search of the creature in 1957, a joint venture with F. Kirk Johnson, a fellow oil man from Fort Worth. The trip to India introduced him to various gurus and awakened in him an interest in levitation, extrasensory perception and telekinesis, and he endeavoured to explore these phenomena scientifically, founding the Mind Science Foundation in 1958.
Slick’s adventurous eye linked itself well to the field of international collecting and in the early 1950s he began to amass an impressive group of works by artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Pablo Picasso, Isamu Noguchi and contemporary British artists such as Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Peter Lanyon, Alan Davie and William Gear. He made a point of visiting museums and galleries whilst travelling and developed close relationships with dealers such as Peter Gimpel in London and Edith Halpert in New York. Following his tragic death in an airplane crash in 1962, a large part of the Slick collection was gifted to the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio in 1973, and works from his collection were exhibited there in 2009.