Clyfford Still

Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Clyfford Still

(born Nov. 30, 1904, Grandin, N.D., U.S. — died June 23, 1980, Baltimore, Md.) U.S. painter. He studied at Spokane University and Washington State College. After experimenting with several styles, he became involved in Abstract Expressionism and was a pioneer of very large, monochromatic painting. His work is often characterized within the "colour-field" subset of Abstract Expressionism. He used thickly applied, opaque paint (impasto) in expressively modulated, jagged forms to portray raw, aggressive power.

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Art Encyclopedia: Clyfford (E.) Still

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(b Grandin, ND, 30 Nov 1904; d Baltimore, MD, 23 June 1980). American painter. His best-known work is associated with ABSTRACT EXPRESSIONISM, although he had established the basis for a strongly original style and outlook before any contact with New York art circles. His early life was divided between Washington state, where he was educated, and a prairie homestead in southern Alberta, Canada. Domestic tensions and the vicissitudes of farm life added an embattled note to his rugged though sensitive intellect. He was also deeply influenced by the vast flatness of the Canadian landscape, which became more desolate during an extended period of drought and depression after 1917. Early paintings such as the Row of Grain Elevators (1929; Washington, DC, N. Mus. Amer. A.) depict the agricultural environment of the prairies in a vigorous, somewhat crude manner reminiscent of Regionalism (see REGIONALISM (ii)). Yet they also stress the symbolic polarities that the artist described as the 'vertical necessity of life' rising against the horizontal. Among other early stylistic traits were the reduction of form to essentials, compositions often structured around a central mass and the device of animating sombre colour schemes with bright accents.

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Biography: Clyfford Still

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Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was one of the pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, although throughout his life he chose isolation from other styles and most other artists.

Clyfford Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota. During his childhood he was interested in music, literature, and poetry, as well as art. A graduate of Spokane University, Still received an M.A. from Washington State College, where he later taught from 1933 to 1941. He lived for a time in Alberta, Canada, and also taught briefly at the College of William and Mary (1943-1945) and at the California School of Fine Arts.

Being something of a renegade from the art establishment, Still rarely exhibited his work. In 1943 he showed 22 canvasses at the San Francisco Museum of Art; in 1946 he had a one-man show at Peggy Guggenheim's New York gallery; and in 1959 he had a major retrospective exhibition at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. He also had major one-man shows at the San Francisco Museum in 1976 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1979.

Still always saw himself as a visionary artist, rather than as one who belonged to a movement. He criticized European modernism for its "sterility" and denied all artistic influences upon his work. Although his style of the 1930s bears some resemblance to Picasso's and his canvasses of the 1940s relate to the satanic, grotesque imagery of some forms of Surrealism, Still consistently rejected all such associations. He also rejected the Classical heritage which forms the basis of Western art and disaffiliated himself from the traditional values of the art world, all of which he saw as decadent and profane. In fact, between 1952 and 1967 Still refused to exhibit in New York because he felt the city was too corrupt for his work. In spite of his having gained an early reputation as a "difficult artist," Still enjoyed a long and successful career.

Philosophically, Still is most often associated with artistic loners such as William Blake and Albert Pinkham Ryder. On a deeper level, his obsession with the theme of the dualism of good and evil is symbolized through his use of light and dark. Critics have drawn parallels between Still's art and Manichaeanism, a heretic faith which originated in Persia in the third century A.D. and which taught the release of the spirit from matter through asceticism. The philosophy is based on separate, but opposing, realms of darkness and light which symbolize the elements of evil and good. Still vehemently rejected any such associations, always negating any attempts to "explain" his works. The fact that his canvasses are untitled, being identified only by dates and letters, helped to create an aura of ambiguity around his art.

In spite of an overall sense of unity in his work, Still's style changed and evolved over the years. His figurative work of the 1930s, rich with interpenetrating forms, gave way in the 1940s to primitive and satanic images. Later in the 1940s, working in a monochromatic palette and using heavy impasto, Still began creating non-representational paintings filled with ragged, flame-like forms. His work of the late 1940s and early 1950s seems to echo the earth tones and open spaces of the Western plains where he grew up, although the artist refused to acknowledge any connections between his paintings and the natural landscape. Often aggressive in mood, the canvasses are rough in texture like the earth itself and are very expressionistic.

During the 1950s Still's paintings became larger in scale and lighter and brighter in color. Sometimes areas of the canvas were left unpainted. By this point in his career the artist seemed free of the dark imagery of the underworld. A mood of spiritual aspiration, reflected in the vertical application of the paint, pervades the work. His friendship with the color-field painter Mark Rothko may have been influential in this move towards an emphasis on size and color. Yet Still retained his textured, tactile surface in contrast to Rothko's color staining. The justapositions of light and dark and the dematerialization of forms remained constant.

Still's work from the 1960s is soft, sensuous, and lyrical in comparison with that of two decades earlier. This shift in his style came at a time when he personally withdrew even further from society, leaving New York to live and work in rural Maryland near Westminster, where he stayed until his death in 1980. However, in 1964 Still gave a group of 31 paintings to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, and in 1976 he made a similar presentation of 28 works to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Clyfford Still's career focused on human aspiration, the personal search for identity, and the liberation of the spirit. Although his jealously guarded privacy kept him from becoming known to the general public, he was, nevertheless, one of the early pioneers of Abstract Expressionism, and he greatly influenced such better known painters as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko.

Still had a wife, Patricia, and two daughters, Diane and Sandra.

Biography

Clyfford Still was a leader in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II. Still's contemporaries included Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Though the styles and approaches of these artists varied considerably, Abstract Expressionism is marked by abstract forms, expressive brushwork, and monumental scale, all of which were used to convey universal themes about creation, life, struggle, and death ("the human condition"), themes that took on a considerable relevance during and after World War II. Described by many as the most anti-traditional of the Abstract Expressionists,^{[citation needed]} Still is credited with laying the groundwork for the movement. Still's shift from representational painting to abstraction occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.^{[citation needed]}

Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. Although Abstract Expressionism is identified as a New York movement, Still's formative works were created during various teaching posts on the West Coast, first in Washington State at Washington State University (1935-41). His work of this period is marked by an expressive figurative style used in depictions of the people, buildings, tools and machinery characteristic of farm life. By the late 1930s, he began to simplify his forms as he moved from representational painting toward abstraction. In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where, following work in various war industries, he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts and what is now known as the San Francisco Art Institute. He taught there from 1946-1950 (with a break in the summer of 1948 when he returned to New York).^[1] It was during this time when Still "broke through" to his mature style. Still also taught at Virginia Commonwealth University from 1943-45.

Still visited New York for extended stays in the late 1940s and became associated with two of the galleries that launched the new American art to the world — Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery and the Betty Parsons gallery. Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her Art of This Century gallery in early 1946. Later that year, the artist returned to San Francisco, where he taught for the next four years at the California School of Fine Arts.^[2] He lived in New York for most of the 1950s, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world. In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries and in 1961 moved to Maryland, removing himself further from the art world. He remained in Maryland with his second wife, Patricia, until his death in 1980. In 1979, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the largest survey of Still's art to date and the largest presentation afforded by this institution to the work of a living artist. Following his death, all works that had not entered the public domain were sealed off from both public and scholarly view, closing off access to one of the most significant American painters of the 20th century.

The paintings

Still was also considered one of the foremost Color Field painters - his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations. Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still's arrangements are less regular. His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath. Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces. His large mature works recall natural forms and natural phenomena at its most intense and mysterious; ancient stalagmites, caverns, foliage, seen both in darkness and in light lend poetic richness and depth to his work. Among Still's well known paintings is 1957-D No. 1, 1957, (above), which is mainly black and yellow with patches of white and a small amount of red. These four colors, and variations on them (purples, dark blues) are predominant in his work, although there is a tendency for his paintings to use darker shades.

Education

Still graduated in 1933 from Spokane University in Washington. In 1935 he received a Master of Arts in Fine Arts degree from Washington State College (now Washington State University). In 1934 Still is invited to be a guest artist at the Yaddo artists community in Saratoga Springs, New York. Along with Worth Griffin, Still co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony in 1937 that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers.

The Clyfford Still Museum

In August 2004, the City of Denver announced it had been chosen to receive the artworks contained within the Clyfford Still Estate. This highly sought-after body of work contains over 2,400 artworks (roughly 825 paintings on canvas and 1575 works on paper - drawings and limited-edition fine-art prints) representing all periods of the American artist's distinguished career and nearly 94% of his total output. The museum will also house the complete Still archives of sketchbooks, journals, notebooks, the artist’s library, and other archival materials.

Allied Works Architecture, led by Brad Cloepfil, was selected to design the museum’s facilities. With offices in Portland, Oregon, and New York City, Allied Works Architecture has wide experience in the design of art museums.

Removed from public view for over twenty-five years, these works will finally be revealed at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado, planned to open to the public in 2010, led by Dean Sobel. The Clyfford Still Museum is an independent nonprofit organization with its own website at [2].

Legacy

Major holdings of Clyfford Still's Paintings can be seen at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Each of these museums has a gallery dedicated solely to Still paintings. In addition, Still paintings are in the collections of many major museums. Because very few artworks made it into private collections, Still paintings tend to be highly sought after on the auction market. In recent years, Christie's has sold two: in 2005, a 1955 painting sold for $7.8m. In 2006 a 1947 canvas set a record at $21.296m.

Quotes

From Still

"I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit."

"It's intolerable to be stopped by a frame's edge."^[3]

"I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man's "time" limits him, it does not truly liberate him. Our age - it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mechanism of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogrance the compliment of a graphic homage."^[4]

"How can we live and die and never know the difference?"

From Others

"Still makes the rest of us look academic."

Jackson Pollock^{[citation needed]}

"His show at (Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in 1946), of all those early shows [Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell], was the most original. A bolt out of the blue. Most of us were still working through images . . . Still had none."

Robert Motherwell^{[citation needed]}

"When I first saw a 1948 painting of Still’s . . . I was impressed as never before by how estranging and upsetting genuine originality in art can be."

Clement Greenberg, art critic; American-Type Painting', Partisan Review, 1955, p.58.

"A remarkable and ultimately highly influential maverick . . . an independent genius."

Sam Hunter, modern art historian;^{[citation needed]}

"It was in the mid-1940s that Still asserted himself as one of the most formally inventive artists of his generation."

John Golding, art historian; Paths to the Absolute, 2000, Princeton University Press

"With their crude palette-knifed and troweled surfaces, their immense space, their strong color, their relentless vertical and horizontal expansiveness, Still’s abstract works project a forcefulness perhaps unequaled in Abstract Expressionist painting."

Stephen Polcari, art historian; Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, 1991, Cambridge University Press

"A singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime."

Robert Hughes, former Time magazine art critic; Time Magazine, Prairie Coriolanus, Feb 9, 1976

Notes

^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.112
^ [1]Clyfford Still.net, retrieved April 30, 2009
^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.123
^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.124

References

Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960

James T. Demetrion (Editor). Publisher: Yale University Press (June 1, 2001), ISBN 0300089694, ISBN 978-0300089691

Clyfford Still: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

John P. O'Neill (Editor). Publisher: Harry N. Abrams (1979) ISBN 0-87099-213-9

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Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still, 1957-D No. 1, 1957, oil on canvas, 113 x 159 in, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Born	November 30, 1904(1904-11-30) Grandin, North Dakota
Died	June 23, 1980 (aged 75)
Nationality	American
Field	Painting
Training	Spokane University Spokane, Washington, Washington State University
Movement	Abstract Expressionism, Color Field painting