Clyfford Still

Biography

In 1978 Clyfford Still wrote his will: all the works remaining in his possession were to go to an American city that would agree to build a separate building for them, maintain it, and never sell, give away or exchange a single one. The city was found only a quarter of a century later.

Until then some 2,400 paintings and drawings lay under lock and key for more than twenty years, closed to the public and to scholars alike.

He was born on 30 November 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota; his childhood was spent in Spokane, Washington, and at Bow Island in southern Alberta. At twenty he came to New York to see modern painting, went into the Metropolitan Museum, found the European masters wanting in depth, enrolled at the Art Students League and walked out of the very first class. He studied at Spokane University (1926–1927, then from 1931, graduating in 1933), and from the autumn of 1933 he taught at Washington State College in Pullman, where he took his Master of Fine Arts in 1935 and stayed until 1941; two summers, 1934 and 1935, he spent at the Yaddo colony in Saratoga Springs. In 1937, with his colleague Worth Griffin, he founded an art colony at Nespelem, on the land of the Colville Reservation; over four summers hundreds of portraits and landscapes of Native American life were painted there. Still moved to non-objective painting between 1938 and 1942, while Pollock and Rothko were still painting figures in the surrealist manner.

In 1941 he left for the San Francisco Bay area, worked in war industries and painted. His first solo exhibition took place in 1943 at the San Francisco Museum of Art; from 1943 to 1945 he taught in Richmond, Virginia, and then moved to New York. Rothko, whom he had met in California in 1943, brought him to Peggy Guggenheim, and her gallery, Art of This Century, gave him a solo show; when Guggenheim closed the gallery in 1947, Still and Rothko moved together to Betty Parsons. Pollock said that Still made the rest of them look academic.

He found his manner in San Francisco, where from 1946 to 1950 he taught at the California School of Fine Arts; he pushed his students to open a short-lived gallery called Metart. By 1947 the format was in place that he would afterwards only enlarge: a big colour field laid on with palette knives. The paint lies thick, in relief, and in this Still differs from Rothko and Newman with their thin, even layers; his patches of colour are ragged and jagged, as though one layer had been torn off and another showed through beneath. In “1957-D No. 1” there is black and yellow with patches of white and a little red; these four colours and their variants, purples and dark blues, are his main ones, and the dark tends to win. He himself said he had never wanted colour to be colour, or texture to be texture: everything was to fuse into a living spirit. To my mind, of all the first generation his canvases are the hardest to imagine from a reproduction: the relief of the paint matters in them no less than the colour.

In 1950 he moved to New York and lived there for most of the decade, while Abstract Expressionism was at its height, but he thought less and less of the art world: in the early 1950s he severed ties with the commercial galleries, and from 1952 to 1959 he declined all public exhibitions. The first full retrospective took place in 1959 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; the same year he was shown at Documenta in Kassel. In 1961 he bought a twenty-two-acre farm near Westminster, Maryland, and painted in the barn in the warm months, and in 1966 he and his wife Patricia settled in a house in New Windsor, eight miles from the farm.

Exhibitions did still happen: the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (1963), the Marlborough-Gerson gallery in New York (1969–1970), a permanent installation of his works at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1975). In 1979 the Metropolitan Museum assembled the largest survey of his painting to date, the largest the museum had ever given a living artist. Still received the Award of Merit for Painting from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1972), became a member in 1978, and in 1975 received the Skowhegan Medal.

He died on 23 June 1980. The city for his pictures was chosen by his widow: in August 2004 Denver announced that it would receive the Still estate, some 825 canvases and 1,575 works on paper, and after Patricia Still’s death in 2005 the archives, sketchbooks, notebooks and the artist’s library were added to them. The Clyfford Still Museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil, opened on 18 November 2011.