Clyfford Still, PH-1062, 1951. Oil on canvas, 114 3.4 x 161 1.2 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver, ARS, NY
By GARY BREWER July 5, 2024
“A great free joy surges through me when I work … as the blues or reds or blacks leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry their power infinitely beyond the bounds of the limiting field, I move with them and find a resurrection from the moribund oppressions that held me only hours ago.”
—Clyfford Still, Diary entry, 1956
It is a joy to see the profoundly moving monumental paintings at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado. Still’s work gains in power when seen en masse, each painting speaking to the others: the bold cadences of his vertical fields of color create oscillating figure/ground relationships, flame-like breaches burst forth on vast areas of blank canvas. Each painting is a complete statement, but together they engage one like stanzas of an infinite visual poem.
Clyfford Still is an artist I have admired for decades. When I moved to the Bay Area many years ago, an important collection of his work, 28 paintings that Still donated to SFMOMA in 1975, were on permanent display. These were works that I would look at again and again, to gain a deeper understanding of what the abstract expressionist painters accomplished beginning in the 1940s and 1950s. Collectively, they reached for a level of art that would convey the romantic sublime, with a moral conviction that painting could be an instrument for self-realization and transcendence. These painters—Rothko, Pollock, Newman and others—all conveyed a spiritual belief in the power of art that still moves and inspires me. So it was a great joy to have an opportunity to visit the Clyfford Still Museum and see this brilliant collection.
The museum exhibits only the work of Clyfford Still, a requirement of his widow, Patricia Still, and the estate. His works were held in limbo, stored in his studio-barn in Maryland, from his death in 1980 until Patricia Still was satisfied with Denver’s 2004 offer to build a museum for the collection, a total of 825 paintings and some 2,300 works on paper.
The museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, is a clean, elegant space beautifully illuminated by overhead skylights, carefully controlled with a system for blocking out the sun as needed to protect the paintings. Each room displays the works with enough space to let them breathe, the colors expanding outward beyond the borders of the canvas, allowing them to communicate their expressive power. Still’s belief that his paintings needed to be seen together, to interact in a dialogue that would enrich the viewer’s understanding of his work, can be felt in these beautifully coordinated displays.
The exhibition begins in the beginning with Still’s early works. He was a self-taught painter, and his early efforts show the journey of unschooled, raw determination and will, wrestling with this unruly medium. He wanted to create his art from the ground up, an American art whose originality broke with the European tradition. With a blend of self-determination, optimism and an enormous sense of confidence, he slogged his way through an early period of awkward expressionistic paintings. Little by little, he found a basic formal vocabulary that satisfied his sensibility, a vocabulary he would use to create a revolutionary, powerful abstract language of painting.
Looking carefully at these early works, one can see the basic components that accomplish the rapturous beauty of his mature works. His early paintings (indeed almost all his works) are done with a palette knife. The landscapes and figures of these paintings are heavily worked with thick impasto surfaces. His colors are dark, turgid browns and ocher. Some of the landscapes have more color, but for the most part he uses a reduced palette, possibly to simplify the complex problem-solving inherent in painting.
As he proceeds, his figures begin to disassemble. Forms become lines, and he starts to introduce the silhouettes of forms. In his strange, distorted, gravity-bound figures one can see the vertical linear outlines of faces, or in the folds of the clothing a graphic mark hints at things to come. Indeed the feeling of weight and gravity, both physical and metaphorical, would come into play in his mature work.
In a landscape painting from 1933, “PH-623,” he achieves a strong feeling of scale very simply. The painting has a sky with clouds that suggest his future flame-like forms. A field of color in the foreground contains a small vertical stripe, perhaps a pole. On the horizon line, several horizontal rectangles evoke a group of buildings. In this simple composition, he creates the strong relationships of scale between elements that would become a major component in his latter works, where a vast field of color would be activated and given a powerful sense of internal scale from a small vertical line or a flame-shaped passage of a different color.
The elements of Still’s mature style can be felt in these early paintings. By the late 1930s the artist is on his way, and by the mid-1940s he is truly finding his expressive language. He is still using an earthy, reductive palette, but the interlocking passages of paint, and the building up of thick surfaces to achieve a dense physicality are in full flower. The painting “PH-598” (1946), shows Still in the beginning of his mature style. The surface is physical. It occupies space. One experiences a feeling of “presence” as a phenomenological force, the painting’s materiality affects one’s consciousness.
When his paintings were shown in 1947 at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, it was as if a bolt of lightening had struck. Artists were shocked by how powerful and almost violent these paintings seemed to their unaccustomed minds and eyes. The painter Kenneth Sawyer years later said of this exhibition, “His works were marked by a violence, a rawness, which few of us were prepared to recognize as art. It was unnerving to have one’s preconceptions so efficiently shorn in a single exhibition. Here was painting that instructed as it destroyed.”
Clyfford Still, PH-163, 1954. Oil on canvas, 96 x 72 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver, ARS, NY
The interlocking forms animating his paintings were freeing themselves from the rules of classical composition. Formal hierarchy was absent; he was beginning to create paintings that are experienced in a singular gestalt. A “holistic” form of painting was brewing in his generation of artists, and Still was forging the path.
The current exhibition is titled Dialogue and Defiance: Clyfford Still and the Abstract Expressionists. The curator, Valerie Hellstein, chose works she felt were responses to or in a dialogue with the other painters or his era. Early on, Mark Rothko was a close friend who shared Still’s heroic aspirations for his art. The exhibit includes several works in which Still employs a horizon, or a horizontal form, that alludes to the rectangular elements in Rothko’s compositions. Another artist, Barnett Newman, created large-scale paintings with vast areas of color broken by vertical “zips.” These works were close to the abstractions that Still produced in the 1950s.
The epic painting “PH-1062” (1951) is a work of gigantic proportions (114¾ x 161½ inches) that suggests Newman’s “Vir Heroicus Sublimis.” This was one of the most magnificent works on view during my visit to the museum, displaying Still at his most transcendent. The color is predominantly red, enveloping the viewer. His surfaces are exquisitely crafted, the rich palette-knife work masterful; Still spent decades refining and defining this technique. A single thin, vertical white line, almost like a chalk line, reaches from top to bottom. A slender vertical passage of black appears on the left edge, and two other small black shapes along the top. Several subtle reds of slightly different tones rise up, breaking up and accentuating the dominant red color field. These internal relationships activate a sense of enormous scale. In this painting, Still’s vision of a limitless space that is not confined by the boundaries of the canvas edge is palpable. The white line—often referred to by the artist as a lifeline—is similar to a slender fracture in a mountain cliff; a crack that one peers into, where light comes through; or a slow mark, a gesture reaching at arm’s length, moving down the painting that states, “I am.” Still took his paintings very seriously, they were instruments for him to transcend the constraints of this world to find a kind of freedom.
Still mixed his own paints, purchasing dry pigments in bulk, sometimes ordering as much as 250 pounds at a time, and blending them with linseed oil. They were often industrial-grade paints, not traditional fine art pigments. A red pigment he favored was used commercially for painting ships and bridges; a coal black he employed was coarsely ground, not the finer particulates used in an art medium. Especially in his black surfaces, he wanted the coarse pigments to add a density, texture and materiality to the painting; they are as much surface as color. To Still, black was not an absence or a negation of color, it was a generative color—the void from which primordial forms arose. His choice of paint materials was not arbitrary but carefully thought out. The stiffness and density of his pigments applied with a palette knife helped to define the rough, jagged edges of his fields of color, and the flame-like bursts on raw canvas. They are meant to achieve and sustain the balance between light and matter, the existential unity between the body and mind.
Another gallery in the museum focuses on paintings done primarily in black and white. Painters such as Still, Franz Kline, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock were discussing ideas about painting and exploring the possibilities of working within the limits of these reductive colors; Newman’s series of black-and-white paintings The Stations of the Cross and Kline’s bold gestural strokes of black paint on white come to mind. One can read a passage of paint as being in front of or behind another form. He often created an ambiguous, oscillating interaction of figure/ground that holds one enthralled with the psychological complexity of a mysterious and engaging power.
The show includes letters of correspondence between Still, Pollock, Newman and others that help to paint a picture of Still’s relationship with his peers and how seriously they took their work. These were artists who believed in art as an existential act of self-realization. In a letter to Pollock after seeing his one-man show, Still wrote, “What each work said, and what its position, what each achieved you must know. … It was that here a man had been at work, at the profoundest work a man can do, facing up to what he is and aspires to.”
Still was an artist of very strong convictions. His combative personality eventually ended many of his relationships with other painters. Over time, his demanding beliefs about how his paintings should be displayed, regarded and understood made him break away from galleries that had exhibited his works and museums that asked to include his works in important exhibitions. After 1952, he rarely exhibited his art, choosing to paint new works and roll them up to be stored in his studio for a future date when a museum would own this immense body of work and display it according to his demands.
The story of Still’s isolation from the art world is a compelling one. During the many decades before the Clyfford Still Museum was finally realized, I had often wondered if this was a quixotic quest by an artist whose romantic sense of self-importance had become an act of self-sabotage, whose strong convictions had put his work’s very existence in jeopardy. Indeed, over the years, many articles came out questioning whether his masterworks were slowly succumbing to the elements, deteriorating in poorly controlled storage conditions in his former studio, a barn in rural Maryland.
His daughter Sandra Still Campbell wrote about the concerns she and her sister had about the storage and conservation of the paintings. “During his lifetime, we repeatedly expressed our anxiety about this to our father. His response was always, ‘Got to get to the next image. I cannot be concerned about the future. That will be up to the next generation.’”
Clyfford Still, PH-979, 1953. Oil on canvas, 117 3.4 x 93 3.8 in. Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, CO. © City and County of Denver, ARS, NY
Barbara A.Ramsay was the first conservator asked to examine the paintings by Clyfford Still, a request made in 2004 by Patricia Still after the city of Denver had agreed to create the museum according to the estate and Patricia Still’s wishes.
I wrote Ms Ramsay to see if she would share what it was like: the apprehension, anxiety and excitement of being the first person to view these works in decades, and the concern that they could be in very poor condition.
Some excerpts from her letter:
As we prepared to unroll the first painting in the survey, the anticipation was palpable. I experienced the thrill of what were to be very special moments in my life. We were going to view, for the first time, paintings that may never before have been seen outside of Still’s studio. I felt an overwhelming mixture of excitement and expectation in having the honour of seeing these paintings, coupled with an underlying apprehension due to the possibility of discovering severe damage and loss.
As the painting was unrolled more and more, the odor of linseed oil was unmistakable as it was released by the newly exposed paint film. I wondered how it was even possible after all of these years but it seemed that rolling of the painting had prevented the oxidation and drying of oil that would normally have taken place.
I felt great exhilaration in viewing the masterpiece revealed to us—bit by bit and then in its entirety. The colors were still so fresh—after having been hidden away from the fading or dulling effects of light and air for all of those years. The paint surfaces were for the most part pristine, and free of cracking, and the impasto was raised as if sculpted by Still’s palette knife just days before. This feeling of elation was repeated each time a new painting was unrolled—each one a unique and personal expression of the artist. (1)
It is indeed a gift to those of us who cherish great paintings that these works survived the decades of storage and are now beautifully displayed in a museum. His legacy is still unfolding, as many people have not had an opportunity to see these works in person.
Clyfford Still was a purist whose unequivocal commitment to his art reached the heights of creative brilliance. His was a spiritual quest for sublime states of freedom. He tore open a space where color, form and emotion were expressed in bold, swift gestures that allowed him to experience moments of rapture and exaltation. These moments when his paintings were realized carry forward into the present the beauty of what is possible. These are powerful works that speak to and elevate the human spirit. WM
Note
1. The quote by Sandra Still Campbell was from the Preface to the book Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Materials, by Susan F. Lake and Barbara A. Ramsay. All other quotes courtesy of the Clyfford Still Archives.
