Draped paintings are paintings on unstretched canvas or fabric that are hung, tied, or draped from individual points and allowed to bunch or fold. The style was developed in the late 1960s and 1970s by several groups of artists, and popularized most notably by American artist Sam Gilliam, who created a large number of Drape paintings throughout his career, often as large-format installation pieces designed to fill an entire wall or space.

In the late 1960s, the idea of shaped canvases in the context of contemporary art was expanding to include three-dimensional shapes and sculptural, painted reliefs. Several groups of artists working in different regions began extending this concept by experimenting with paintings without stretcher bars or made with everyday fabrics and objects, or presenting the stretcher bars themselves as art.

Working in New York, Richard Tuttle began to pin colored and painted irregular geometric fabric shapes to the wall in 1967. Artists associated with the Supports/Surfaces movement in France, beginning the same year, started hanging large painted fabrics on the wall, often combining multiple pieces of fabric together. Sam Gilliam in Washington, D.C., Claude Viallat in France, and Nina Yankowitz in New York – among possibly others – concurrently and without knowledge of each other began knotting and folding their wet canvases or painted fabrics to achieve the patterns they wanted in the compositions before draping them in different combinations on the wall, starting in 1967 and 1968. Gilliam in particular rapidly increased the size of his canvases and began to suspend his works out beyond the gallery wall, sometimes tying them from points in the ceiling or middle of the room, bringing the paintings into conversation with the architectural features of the gallery space.

Sculptors and mixed media artists including Lynda Benglis, Eva Hesse, and Robert Morris, all working around the same time in the late 1960s and early 1970s, were also beginning to use suspended and wall-based fabrics and sculptural elements, draped or shaped in similar ways. Some artists in this wave of exploration of material and form would eventually be broadly categorized by several critics and historians as early postminimalist artists, for their use of everyday materials and objects to create a new kind of "anti-formalist" art that rejected key aesthetic elements of minimalism and medium specificity, both of which were leading formalist strains of art production and criticism in the 1960s. Critic Robert Pincus-Witten, a leading proponent of postminimalist art, defined this as art whose content or form is an exploration of what art can or should be, but as defined through an artist or critic's own personal "imperfect world of experience;" this eventually also led to and encompassed the development of conceptual art.

In 1968 and 1969 Yankowitz had two exhibitions of draped paintings in New York, using the terms "Draped Paintings" and "Pleated Paintings" as the titles of the shows.

Critics first described Gilliam's draped canvas paintings in 1969 variously as "hanging canvas," "soft" paintings, and, once they became more elaborate, "situations;" Gilliam himself originally used the terms "suspended paintings" and "sculptural paintings" to describe the style. Several critics and art historians – and Gilliam – came to call his works in this style his Drapes or "Drape paintings," both for the method of draping and for their resemblance to heavy Baroque-style fabric window drapery, which he cited as an inspiration in 1970.

Gilliam's Drape paintings first began as an extension of an earlier series of abstract paintings displayed on beveled stretcher bars, which extended the paintings several inches off the wall like sculptured reliefs. To create these paintings he would pour and soak thinned acrylic paint onto canvases laid directly on the floor, before folding them to create clear lines and pools of color in the composition. Starting in late 1967, Gilliam experimented with draping these canvases once they had dried; he left them crumpled and folded to dry, and then used rope, leather, wire, and other materials to suspend, drape, or knot the paintings from walls and ceilings of his workshop. He tested a range of fabrics for these paintings, including linens, silks, and cotton materials.

The precise genesis of Gilliam's Drape paintings is unclear, as he offered multiple explanations throughout his life. Among the most-cited origin stories is that he was inspired by laundry hanging on clotheslines in his neighborhood in such volumes that the clotheslines had to be propped up to support the weight, an explanation he told ARTnews in 1973. Alternately, he told art historian Jonathan P. Binstock in 1994 that he had visited artist Kenneth Noland in Vermont in 1967 and engaged in a significant discussion about the sculpture of Anthony Caro and David Smith: "What really shocked me is that I had never thought about sculpture at all ... And that's what led to the draped paintings; I mean, trying to produce a work that was about both painting and sculpture." Further still, he told filmmaker Rohini Tallala in 2004 that the Drape paintings had been inspired by his father's work as a hobbyist carpenter making sets for plays at their church in Louisville. In a 2011 interview with Kojo Nnamdi on WAMU, he directly refuted the widely cited origin story about laundry on clotheslines, telling Nnamdi that the Drapes were "a business decision," made because he "had to do something different," and that they had been inspired by Washington's Rock Creek Park.