Terry Winters

Good Government
1984

Abstract painting with various textured shapes resembling stones and cells in earthy tones on a light background.

The forms in Terry Winters’s Good Government include crystals, chromosome fragments, dividing cells, and indeterminate bits of organic matter. Winters worked on this large painting for three months, considering it finished when he “thought it looked like one of those maps you saw in grammar school and it said ‘good government’ and everything was working together.” The work’s title also refers to the famous fourteenth-century fresco of the same name by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in the Palazzo Publico, Siena, Italy. Partly based on Aristotelian ideals, Lorenzetti’s fresco is an allegory of enlightened civic rule, resulting in a content and prosperous population. Winters’s biomorphic forms, like Lorenzetti’s earlier image, suggest both a landscape and the forms of a burgeoning society, seen from several independent perspectives. Yet according to the artist, such references explain only the inception of the work. “I always start from someplace outside myself,” Winters has said, “and end up someplace inside myself.”

Not on view

Date
1984

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Oil on linen

Dimensions
Overall: 101 1/4 × 136 1/4in. (257.2 × 346.1 cm)

Accession number
85.15

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from The Mnuchin Foundation and the Painting and Sculpture Committee

Rights and reproductions
© Terry Winters

API
artworks/3351

Audio

Terry Winters, Good Government, 1984

In Fast Forward: Painting from the 1980s

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Terry Winters, Good Government, 1984

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Narrator: Artist Terry Winters draws from biological and botanical imagery to create the enigmatic shapes you see in this painting. The large forms hovering on the top look like honeycombs and the black shapes drifting along the bottom seem reminiscent of chromosomes. These semi-abstract forms allow Winters to explore a variety of painting techniques.
Terry Winters: There is a way I was trying to develop an almost encyclopedic range of paint applications across the surface. So there’s a range of paint handling from very thin and transparent layers in the, sort of the middle section of the painting, to these very densely impastoed constructions of the forms in the upper left of the painting. And some forms that are much more volumetric and others that are built out of linear constructions.
Just as there was an interest in developing different kinds of paint surfaces, there was also an interest in the range of techniques and paint applications that could be applied to the picture. So there was a classical use of brushes but also rags and painting knives that were also used in getting the paint on the surface.
Narrator: The title of the painting, Good Government, is in part a reference to a famous fourteenth century Renaissance fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti, which Winters saw in Siena just before making this work. But it also refers to the way everything in the painting comes together.
Terry Winters: And at some point the picture, all of these disparate elements came together for me in some sense. It reminded me a bit of those charts you would see in elementary school about good government, where all the different things were all working together. And it took on that almost sort of modernist, formalist idea about when the painting is working, and suddenly it was all sort of working.