Clyfford Still – The Purist

Clyfford Still, PH-972, 1959, oil on canvas, 112 x 155 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York

Clyfford Still managed to become one of the most celebrated Abstract Expressionist painters and one of postwar art’s most elusive figures.

By Sarah E. Fensom

Clyfford Still sold approximately 81 works during his lifetime. He had only 15 exhibitions. But neither statistic is due to a lack of demand for the pioneering Abstract Expressionist painter’s bold and uncompromising work, nor to a dearth of output.

PW-25, 1949, watercolor on paper, 7 3⁄4 x 5 5⁄8 in.
Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York

Still’s contemporaries celebrated his outsized, exuberant paintings vociferously. He had arrived at pure abstraction between 1938 and 1942, shedding figurative tendencies earlier than his colleagues (many of whom continued to paint in a figurative-surrealist style into the 1940s). The intense effect of Still’s abstract shift was perceived quickly and deeply by the art world’s leading players. Jackson Pollock, the popular face of Ab-Ex, said Still’s work made the rest of the New York School’s output look “academic.” Comparing Still’s 1946 show at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery to other “early” Abstract Expressionist and Color Field shows (like his own and Mark Rothko’s), Robert Motherwell said Still’s was the most original, “a bolt out of the blue.” He added, “Most of us were still working through images…Still had none.” Clement Greenberg, Ab-Ex’s most attentive critic, wrote of Still’s shocking uniqueness in the seminal essay “American-Type Painting.” Greenberg said, “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.”

Of the incredibly limited amount of exhibitions Still allowed, most were highly notable. His big break was a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1943. The aforementioned Art of the This Century Gallery show helped establish him in the firmament of the New York abstract painting pantheon, while an exhibition at the Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco in 1947 broke similar ground in the West. He relocated to New York from the Bay Area in 1950. But after exhibiting work at several leading galleries, he withdrew from public exhibition and sale in 1951. The remaining exhibitions throughout his career were scant but highly significant—a major solo show at Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1959, another at Marlborough-Gerson Art Gallery in 1969, and a hulking retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art  in 1979 (the largest retrospective dedicated to a single living artist at the museum).

Still created thousands of paintings and works on paper throughout his 50- some-year career. He left New York in 1961 for a remote barn studio in Maryland. Before he died in 1980, Still completed nearly 1,500 works there alone. In a 1990 article in Art in America, Ben Heller, a celebrated collector and expert of Abstract Expressionism, estimated that Still’s estate consisted of 2,209 works of art. “750 oils on canvas, many very large (100 are wider than 12 feet, 210 are wider than 10 feet, and 198 are wider than 8 feet), and 1,459 works on paper,” wrote Heller. It turns out the collector was short a few hundred works—when the Clyfford Still Museum was completed in Denver in 2011, it received an excess of 830 paintings and 2,300 works on paper from Still’s estate.

PH-401, 1957, oil on canvas, 113 x 155 in.
Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York

So it seems Still was particular. This particularity dictated how or if his paintings were seen, purchased, and even written about (Still disputed even favorable critiques of his work). To those who have closely followed or admired his career, “particular” may not be a strong enough word to describe an artist who was unflinchingly committed to determining the fate of his output and artistic vision in its entirety. Maybe a descriptor like controlling is more appropriate. But “controlling” seems to paint the artistic desire to guide and maintain the afterlife of his life’s work in too negative a light. For Still, it came from a pure, idealistic (maybe even quixotic) place.

Still’s commitment to a sort of providence over his work is perhaps best exemplified by his will. As mentioned above, Still had sold only 80-some works throughout his career. He gave 31 works to the Albright Knox Gallery and 28 to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art during his lifetime, and his widow Patricia gifted 10 works to the Met after Still’s death. Thus, when he died at 75 in 1980, Still’s estate, which was in Patricia’s care, held more than 95 percent of the artist’s oeuvre. Still’s will stipulated that the work in his estate be given to an American city that was willing to create a permanent museum dedicated solely to the care, display, and scholarship of his work. That way, the major thrust of his output could be viewed in one location, providing viewers with a sweeping picture of the artist’s trajectory.

For a 1970 profile for Vogue magazine, the art historian Katharine Kuh visited the elusive Still in the turn-of-the-century Maryland mansion he settled in in his later years (the barn studio was on a stretch of land nearby). Kuh’s description of the artist’s house, which Still shared with Patricia and his daughter, shed significant light on Still’s vision for his work. She wrote, “Living space for himself and his family is comfortable, but top billing goes to the studio and to other rooms piled high with stretched paintings plus hundreds of rolled ones, some thirteen feet long.” Kuh posited that many of the paintings might be safer in warehouses, but Still seemed to “need them around him both as recapitulations of the past and as clues to the future.” “I think,” Kuh wrote, “if he had his way, he would sell nothing and keep intact the entire record of his life. For the painting are his life. He says ‘They are my way of growing and thinking; they are my autobiography.’ He sees them as an ‘extension of his mind and heart and hand.’ They are the center of his being: he would sacrifice anything to protect their integrity.”

PH-382 (Self-portrait), 1940, oil on canvas, 41 1⁄2 x 38 1⁄8 in.
Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York

With the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver on November 18, 2011, Still’s sacrifices to protect his work’s integrity came to a monumental fruition. Allied Works Architecture designed the two-story, 28,500-square-foot building specifically to display Still’s work. The museum’s nine galleries abound with the artist’s electric canvases, historic photographs, objects, and letters. The museum’s programming is dedicated to Still’s painting, his life, his influence, and his work alone.

Still was born in North Dakota in 1904. He came from a long line of farmers, and his family moved between Spokane, Wash. and a farm in southern Alberta, Canada for much of his childhood. Painting, a reprieve from rigorous farm work, entered his life when he was 16.

As a young adult, he wrote to a friend, “Farming, as you may guess, is for me a scarcely tolerable pastime…Accordingly, I am going to throw myself into art—painting to be specific—with a gusto that may prove me a genius or a wreck.” Still heartily upheld this vow, approaching his work with an intense professionalism (he was known to wear a shirt and tie beneath his artist’s smocks). The art historian Susan Landauer, who spoke with many of the artist’s students, described his impeccable studio life thus: “Palette knives, brushes, and oils were laid out in meticulous order, and nothing was wasted…This insistence upon discipline and control had a significant impact on his painting…Accident played no part in his creative process.”

In 1925, Still visited New York and attended classes at the Art Students League very briefly (purportedly for only 40 mins). A visit to the Met to scope out the European masters during the trip, left him uninspired. Interestingly, he would claim on the occasion of his 1979 retrospective at the New York museum, “My work is not influenced by anybody.”

He studied public art at Spokane University and received a graduate degree in fine arts from Washington State College in 1935. He taught at the latter through 1941. During the 1930s, he spent summers at the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., in 1934 and 1935. In 1936, he co-founded an artists’ colony in Nespelem, a small enclave in northern Washington, where he produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation. In the early 1940s, he relocated with his wife and two daughters to San Francisco, where he worked as a technical draftsman as part of the war effort and painted portraits. In 1943, he left his family behind in the Bay Area, accepting a teaching position in Richmond, Va., but in 1946, he was back teaching at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco.

In the late 1940s, when he began breaking into the New York scene with help from Mark Rothko, whom he had met in San Francisco (Rothko introduced Still to Guggenheim and even wrote the catalogue entry for his show at Art of This Century), Still stopped titling his canvases conventional titles, favoring what was effectively a cataloguing system of numbers and letters instead. The artist removed works made prior to 1946, like intense self-portraits and abstractions with recognizable geometric shapes, from the public arena, shuffling them into his estate.

PW-26, 1949, watercolor on paper, 6 5⁄8 x 5 3⁄4 in.
Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver / ARS, New York

What Still achieved in the second half of the 1940s, the ’50s, and throughout the remaining decades of his career was an intense form of abstraction that, though, it’s been called Color Field or action painting, is really its own thing. His fields of color and black (his blacks are vats of tar or chunks of asphalt—true black holes sucking in space) don’t feel painted, they feel ripped onto the canvas. His forms aren’t shapes, they’re jagged and electric pieces that seem to cavort and convulse well outside of the parameters of the canvas. His application of paint is thick, almost like a growth or left-behind decay. Many of his canvases, especially later ones, are huge, as if Still was supplanted reality with the world of his paintings.

Still, though friendly with a host of New York school painters, didn’t consider his work and theirs vitally intertwined. In a 1978 interview with Thomas Albright, Still said, “There was no cabal, no gang, no real movement, although we shared certain basic attitudes, a basic vocabulary. These were strong people. They had their hands on a strong thing. I think I may have been the only one who fully realized how strong this thing was. When you have a tiger by the tail, you don’t deal with it lightly.” The notion of the artist as a social creature, which so repelled him, he said, was introduced largely by the European émigrés who flooded New York during wartime.

When Still excused himself from art-world goings on in the early ’50s, he closed the door on group shows and transactions with museums and dealers. He also halted popular and critical discourse about his work, shutting down critics like Greenberg, Alfred Barr, and James Thrall Soby, and giving “interviews” that were mainly monologues (“I prefer the innocent reaction of those who might think they see cloud shapes in my paintings to what Clement Greenberg says that he sees in them,” Still said). Sometimes he fought with art-world figures, but always with the preservation of his vision in mind. Recounting a publicized battle with a dealer, he told Albright, “I know many artists pictured me sitting in my studio feeling angry and bitter, but I was having the time of my life.” He continued, “When I die, people will say—they are saying it already—that I acted ruthlessly and amorally, with ingratitude to those towards whom I should be grateful. And they will be correct. At the same time, I can think of no other way for a serious artist to achieve his ends than by doing what I did…I set about to show that this instrument—the limited means of the paint on canvas—was important.”

The virtuosic painter Lisa Yuskavage named a 2015 survey at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum “The Brood” after a 1979 David Cronenberg movie of the same title. The artist said in an interview in the exhibition’s catalogue that she thought of the title when an audience member asked her about her figurative paintings being offensive. “…as I was trying to find a way to answer him, I remembered that in The Brood, the protagonist gives birth to little monsters that run amok. Nothing real is harmed in the case of making paintings, but those objects are out there running around, and if you feel offended or harmed by them, the harm is real.”

Yuskavage not only makes an important point about intentionality versus effect in regard to artworks, but also acknowledges an aspect of disseminating works within exhibition spaces and the marketplace. When works get released into the world, they take on a life of their own; they run amok, as it were. The trouble they get into certainly is not limited to causing offense (though culturally we’re in a moment of grappling with the offenses art causes, both past and present). It may be possible that offenses, both very minor and major, can be done to them. Still’s desire to mitigate offenses meant keeping his brood intact. He believed that every single artwork in his oeuvre was a crucial step in his artistic process, that each work led to the next, that they were all interconnected. As such, they should be kept and seen as closely in their entirety as possible. Speaking to Albright in the 1978 interview, on the heels of his gift of 28 paintings to SFMOMA, Still said, “The individual paintings are important, but the most important thing is a man’s life work. It’s the idea behind them that counts.”

Kuh wrote that freedom was Still’s ultimate aim. He wanted freedom from the art world, for sure (as Kuh put it, he wanted, “no intrusions, no art gossip, no press views, no cocktail parties, no openings or closings, no novelties, no pretty competitions”). And the way Still navigated his career can make him appear like some kind of enigma. But really, wasn’t being enigmatic the exact opposite of what he desired? Still wanted understanding. He didn’t much care what people thought of him, but he wanted his work to be deeply understood, observed, and cared for. He even wanted an entire building to be erected for that understanding and care. In the end, he wasn’t just a painter, he was an architect.