Clyfford Still among American abstract artists, The Irascibles, including William Baziotes, James C. Brooks, Jimmy Ernst, Adolph Gottlieb, Hedda Sterne, Willem de Kooning, Bradley Walter Tomlin, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Theodoros Stamos, Richard Pousette-Dart, Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt, and Mark Rothko. Photo by Nina Leen//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Clyfford Still was an American painter who ranked among the first representatives of Abstract Expressionism being one of its leading and creative figures right after the Second World War. Still is often associated with Color Field movement as well.
The majority of the artist’s canvases represent the conflicts between man and nature. Among the subjects of his early were farm laborers.
Background
Clyfford Still was born on November 30, 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota, United States to a family of an accountant Elmer Still.
Still was raised in Spokane, Washington where his father worked and in Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada where the family owned a wheat homestead.
Among his childhood interests were music, literature, and poetry, as well as art.
Education
Clyfford Still taught himself to paint in his childhood by copying the reproductions of the great masters in his mother’s magazines.
At the age of twenty-one, he enrolled at the Art Students League which he soon left because was not satisfied with the teaching approach. The young man came back to Washington in 1926 and entered Spokane University where he studied painting, literature and philosophy. Still graduated in 1933.
In a couple of years, he obtained the Master's degree in Fine Arts from Washington State College (currently Washington State University) with the thesis on Paul Cézanne.
Clyfford Still started his career from a teacher’s post at his alma mater, Washington State College (currently Washington State University) where he had taught art till 1941. During this period, he created a lot of figurative canvases depicting people, buildings and machinery side of farm life.
In 1941, the artist moved to San Francisco Bay area, California where he earned his living in various war industries and continued to paint. He simplified the forms on his canvases by the time to vertical flame-like shapes on dark backgrounds and so shifted from formative works to non-representational abstract paintings. Two years after his settlement in California, Still had his first one-man show at the San Francisco Museum of Art (currently San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) where he demonstrated to the public twenty-two of his canvases.
The same year, the artist came to Virginia and joined the teacher’s staff of the Richmond Professional Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth University) for a couple of years.
After, he went for some time to New York City. While there, Mark Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim who exhibited his artworks at her Art of This Century Gallery. The following year, Still began his collaboration with Betty Parsons gallery.
Although the artist spent a lot of time in New York, he pursued his activity in California. In 1946, he began to teach art at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute). He painted a great amount of canvases some of which were demonstrated at the personal exhibition held at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor the following year. Still had worked in California till his comeback to New York City in 1950.
Continuing to develop his style, Clyfford Still added the areas of bare canvas in his artworks and started experimenting with horizontal compositions. His critical attitude to art world reached its peak. He romped with his colleagues and broke off contacts with commercial galleries. In 1957, he rejected the proposition to participate at the Venice Biennale. The pause had lasted from 1952 to the end of the decade.
In 1959, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York hosted a huge retrospective of Still’s artworks.
At the beginning of the new decade, the artist ran away from New York art scene to a farm near Westminster, Maryland. In 1963, the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia organized the solo exhibition of Still's canvases.
By 1966, Clyfford Still relocated with his wife to New Windsor where he had worked till the end of his days.
The last presentations of the artist’s creations included the shows at the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, New York in 1970, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 1975 and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City four years later.
Clyfford Still criticized European modernism for its “sterility”. 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.
Quotations:
"These are not paintings in the usual sense; they are life and death merging in fearful union. As for me, they kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation."
"You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire."
"It's intolerable to be stopped by a frame's edge."
"I want the spectator to be on his own before the paintings, and if he finds in them an imagery unkind or unpleasant or evil, let him look to the state of his own soul."
"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 into a living spirit."
"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 arrogance the compliment of a graphic homage."
Membership
American Academy Arts and Letters
,
United States
1978
Personality
Clyfford Still had difficult character and preferred isolation to the companies of art establishment. At the beginning of the 1950s, he denied to present his canvases in New York City calling it too corrupt for his work.
He didn’t like any comparison of his artworks, including the comparison of his early creations with Pablo Picasso’s art or with the forms of Surrealism. Still treated negatively all the attempts to “explain” his canvases, that is why many of them have no title in order to preserve the aura of ambiguity.
Quotes from others about the person
"Still makes the rest of us look academic." Jackson Pollock, American painter
"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
"A remarkable and ultimately highly influential maverick . . . an independent genius." Sam Hunter, modern art historian
"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
"A singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime." Robert Hughes, art critic
Connections
Clyfford Still was married twice.
His first wife became Lillian August Battan in about 1930. The marriage produced two daughters named Sandra and Diane. Lillian and Clyfford broke out at the end of the 1940s and divorced officially in 1954.
In 1957 the artist married one of his students at the Washington State University who was sixteen years his junior. Her name was Patricia Alice Garske.
Patricia became a faithful supporter of her husband and helped him in his artistic activity throughout his lifetime having brilliant organizational skills. It was she who made a great contribution to the foundation of the Clyfford Still Museum.
Clyfford Still
This vividly illustrated book with the essays by David Anfam, Brooks Adams and Neal Benezra contains more than thirty of Still's greatest works, paintings that represent the full flowering of his style
2001
Clyfford Still: the Artist's Museum
The publication celebrates one of abstract expressionism’s founders and his work. The book offers intimate reflections written by his daughters Sandra Still Campbell and Diane Still Knox, the essays by Dean Sobel and David Anfam