^
Died on 23 June 1980: Clifford E.
Still, US Abstract
Expressionist painter born on 30 November 1904. — [Is it true that
when he said to a model: “Please be still,” she took it as a marriage
proposal? Still less believable is the story of the moonshiner who still
wanted a Still still still-life.] [Unfortunately some people just can't
stand Still.]
— Still, born [not stillborn] in Grandin, North Dakota, attended Spokane
University in Washington for a year in 1926 and again from 1931 to 1933.
After graduation, he taught at Washington State College in Pullman until
1941. Still spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now
Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York. From 1941 to 1943, he worked in defense
factories in California. In 1943, his first solo show took place at the
San Francisco Museum of Art, and he met Mark Rothko in Berkeley at this
time. The same year, Still moved to Richmond, where he taught at the Richmond
Professional Institute. When Still was in New York in 1945, 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. Solo exhibitions of his work were held at the Betty Parsons
Gallery, New York, in 1947, 1950, and 1951 and at the California Palace
of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco, in 1947. In New York in 1948, Still
worked with Rothko and others on developing the concept of the school that
became known as the Subjects of the Artist. He resettled in San Francisco
for two years before returning again to New York. In 1961, he settled on
his farm near Westminster, Maryland. Still died in Baltimore.
— Attempted to free his work from the European tradition, Still began
in the mid 1930s to paint semi-abstract pictures with residual imagery of
figures or landscape. Worked 1941-1943 in war industries in California;
made few paintings then but these showed further development towards abstraction.
Taught from 1943-1945 at the Richmond Professional Institute, Richmond,
Virginia, then moved to New York and became friendly with the artists developing
towards Abstract Expressionism, especially Rothko and Pollock. Taught at
the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco 1946-50. Lived in New
York again 1950-1961, working in increasing isolation. Declined all public
exhibitions from 1952-1959, and in 1961 moved to Maryland, to work in tranquillity,
away from the art world. Died in Baltimore.
— Although his best-known work is associated with Abstract Expressionism,
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) depict the agricultural environment of the prairies in a vigorous,
somewhat crude manner reminiscent of Regionalism. 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 somber color schemes with
bright accents.
— “he
was out of step with his time” — “Still’s
paintings are not for everyone”
— LINKS
— Jamais
(May 1944, 165x82cm) _ Like some paintings of William
Baziotes, Robert
Motherwell, and Mark Rothko, Jamais dates from the formative,
exploratory period of Abstract
Expressionism. Although the influence of Surrealism
pervaded the work of these artists in the early forties, they were moving
toward distinctive independent styles.
Until 1946–1947 the single upright figure
dominated Clyfford Still’s painting. In its elongation and expressionistic
distortion, this element is reminiscent of figures painted by Joan Miró
and Pablo
Picasso in the 1930s. Here the figure is barely particularized, appearing
as a black flame or cleft in the blazing environment that surrounds it.
Later it was to disappear entirely within the craggy, tenebrous abstractions
for which Still is best known. The sphere, which interrupts the thrusting
verticality of his tense lines in several of these early works, was also
to vanish. Concern with the contrast of light and dark was to become increasingly
important and was emphasized by jarring color juxtapositions. The canvas,
already large in this example, was to reach monumental proportions and create
an impact rivaling that of the viewer’s own environment.
The present painting is one of the few by
Still bearing its original title. He disdained titles, and discarded those
he had given to early works because he considered that they too strongly
influenced the observer’s experience of the painting. Indeed, Jamais
lends an air of finality and melancholy to this scene and encourages one
to read the figure as howling in protest or despair above a setting sun.
— 1946-H
(Indian Red and Black) (1946, 199x174cm) — 1947
— 1948
_ By 1947, Still had begun working in the format that he would intensify
and refine throughout the rest of his career—a large-scale color field crudely
applied with palette knives. Still liberated color from illusion-ary design
by allowing large, uninterrupted tonal areas to interlock on a flat plane.
He dispensed with typically “beautiful” colors in favor of more disquieting
hues to create unsettling impressions. In 1948, visceral smears
of brown, mustard, and dark crimson impasto seem to spread beyond the canvas.
The painting’s soaring scale and the energy of the roughly painted crags
suggest the boundlessness the artist revered. The patches of earth tones
in many canvases, including 1948, have been interpreted as organic shapes:
parched riverbeds, frozen wastelands, swamps, and even flayed skin. Wishing
to avoid the possibility of such associations, Still left his paintings
untitled, or identified them simply by the year of their creation. Evocative
titles, in the artist’s opinion, might influence the viewer’s experience
as they contemplate the palpable tension and sense of the infinite that
can be found within the canvas.
Still espoused what he regarded as particularly
American ideals such as absolute freedom and individuality, which were manifested
in his works as well as in his artistic career. Although he was given solo
exhibitions at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery in 1946 and
Betty Parson’s Gallery in 1947, he disdained the commercial aspects of the
art world and became increasingly aloof from the burgeoning New York School,
to the point of refusing to exhibit for a period between 1952 and 1958.
Although the artist scorned categorization, his expansive can-vases dominated
by jagged fields of color were influential among the Abstract Expressionist
artists he was grouped with, in particular Barnett Newman and Mark
Rothko, who shared his interest in the metaphysical sublime. These artists
believed that a painting could convey meaning without reference to anything
outside of its inherent formal and material qualities. Rather than capture
a realistic representation of the world in his abstract paintings, Still
sought to create a transcendental experience that was purely visual and
impossible to describe with words.
— 1949 |
1944
Arthur Segal, in London, Romanian painter, printmaker, and teacher, born
on 13 June 1875. — [Is it true that a visitor at an art gallery pointed out
a stormy beach scene to his daughter and mistakenly said: “See, gal, a Segal
seagull in a sea gale.”] 
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