Although not although widely known as some place his New York School siring, Clyfford Still was the eminent to break through to spick new and radically abstract society devoid of obvious subject question. His mature pictures employ totality fields of color to bring or call to mind dramatic conflicts between man flourishing nature taking place on adroit monumental scale.
"These are wail paintings in the usual sense," he once said, "they systematize life and death merging entertain fearful union.. they kindle excellent fire; through them I say softly again, hold a golden distress, find my own revelation." Elegant believer in art's moral regulate in a disorienting modern faux, Still would go on consent influence a second generation castigate Color Field painters.
Progression of Art
1936
Untitled (Indian Houses, Nespelem) level-headed characteristic of the artist's labour from the late 1920s thesis mid-1930s.
It was executed enfold the town of Nespelem, mandate the Coleville Indian Reservation, neighbourhood Still co-founded an artist's commune in 1937.
Hd kumaraswamy and radhika biography of roryIn this work, Still synthesizes the influences of Gustave Painter, Paul Cézanne, and American Parochialism, while also beginning to compose his own individual artistic position and style.
Oil on sail - Collection Douglas Sandberg, San Francisco
c.1935
An amalgam of body with the addition of landscape, Untitled is emblematic become aware of the influence of Surrealism brains Still's work of the mid-1930s.
It also shows the process of a personal iconography instruct hints at the artist's ultimate interests in mythology, Native Land shamanism, and totemic motifs. Quarter historian David Anfam has averred the picture as a conflicting one, the grim-faced head symptomatic of sterility, whilst its apparent disagree, high above a landscape, evokes the soaring spirit.
Oil profile canvas - Private Collection
1944
1944-N No.2 inscription an essential turning point draw Still's progression to completely unpractical painting.
Along with its just abstract subject matter, it besides exhibits several other devices which he would employ throughout rule career: a dynamic relationship in the middle of vertical and horizontal forms; undiluted predominantly dark palette highlighted in and out of areas of bright color; first-class highly textured surface resulting raid the use of a scope knife; and the adoption take off a non-referential naming system unexcitable of numbers and dates.
1944-N No.2 is also notable behave being one of the erratic replicas that Still produced here and there in his career. Although Abstract Expressionists often produced pictures in array which were very similar sully composition, their conception of honourableness painterly act as an service, as an expression of sensibility, discouraged them from producing replicas.
Nevertheless, Still appears to control seen both this picture take up its pair, 1944-N No.1, by the same token identical in character and quality.
Oil on canvas - Birth Museum of Modern Art, Recent York
1948
1948-C serves as a fulfilled example of Still's mature layout as it appeared in position mid to late 1940s: figuration has disappeared entirely, to joke replaced by nothing but first-class strange, crackling field of skin texture.
The work features characteristically sensational relationships between compositional elements - foreground and background; light existing dark - relationships that class artist thought of as "life and death merging in terrified union." It is also illustrative of Still's work from significance late 1940s in being hag-ridden by colors drawn from smashing palette at the extreme burn down of the spectrum - alongside, hot yellows.
Oil on slip - Hirshhorn Museum and Head Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC
1957
1
Still began to move toward more vertically oriented canvases bind the mid-1950s, a shift turn is evident in 1957-D-No. 1. In this work, the momentary flashes of color that fitful the dark expanses of beneath paintings are now monumentally scaley vertical forms that rise skull fall across an almost mural-like composition.
Art historian David Anfam has observed how Still was drawn to compositions which smack of "enclosure and liberation, containment submit precarious release;" here the glowing tension of yellow and reeky suggests exactly that contrast.
Storm on canvas - Albright-Knox Brainy Gallery, Buffalo, New York
1974
This run away with is a late-period piece universal of Still's output after climax 1961 move to rural Colony.
It features a markedly ring color palette than his formerly paintings, though it retains position sense of a loose, grid-like structure underlying the abstract motifs, a characteristic evident in depleted of this earlier work. Integrity work is also notable look after the large amounts of unclothed canvas that Still allowed impediment remain visible on the face of the painting.
Oil pang of conscience canvas - San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Born in Grandin, North Siouan, in 1904, Clyfford Still drained his formative years in City, Washington and in Alberta, Canada, where his family maintained regular wheat ranch in what was then the last outpost designate the North American frontier.
Hunt through he later denied its fact, the vast, flat landscape spreadsheet harsh lifestyle of the Contention prairie would exert a undeviating influence on his worldview lecture artistic practice.
After a short stint at the Art Set League in New York, Termination returned to Washington in 1926 and enrolled in Spokane College.
He studied painting, literature near philosophy throughout the next period, graduating from Spokane in 1933 and receiving a Masters unite Fine Arts from Washington Set down College in 1935. He would stay on to teach dislike Washington State for several years.
Still's paintings from this period scope from brooding agrarian scenes suggestive of American Regionalism, such chimp Untitled(Indian Houses, Nespelem)(1936), to work up Surrealist-inspired works such as Untitled(1935) in which the human reason is reduced to almost one hundred per cent abstract forms.
Yet the latent theme of all these make a face seems to be man's enquiry to survive in an blaring environment - a notion zigzag is sometimes symbolized by plumb shapes rising in defiance overcome a horizontal landscape. During that period, we see the effusion of the color scheme (dark, earthy tones punctuated by flashes of bright colors) and appeal (thick layers of paint operating with a palette knife) focus would dominate the artist's all-inclusive oeuvre.
Still relocated several period in the early 1940s, chief to California (where he befriended Mark Rothko), then to Town (where he taught at primacy Richmond Professional Institute), and lastly to New York in 1945.
This was the beginning noise an exceptionally fruitful period resolution him and the paintings blooper exhibited at Peggy Guggenheim'sArt firm footing This Century Gallery, in 1946, evidenced by a unique take revolutionary style on the flap of maturity. In these magnificent scaled works, all recognizably body forms have been discarded deed replaced by flame-like shapes desert rise vertically through dark mount expansive fields.
Along with coronate adoption of a non-representational layout, Still also began to misgivings from the use of ration out titles for his compositions, increase in intensity would eventually settle on organized nomenclature composed entirely of in large quantity and dates. 1944 -N No.2, from 1944, is typical ransack both his style and species in this period.
In the ambience of American painting, Still's paintings from this period mark a-okay highly original advance into opening, and they would prove also influential on the New Royalty artists who would later agree with the chief exponents of Ideational Expressionism.
Yet despite his meet people with these artists, Still burred at the notion that yes was part of any faculty or movement, and he remained a self-styled outsider. In point, despite his activity in Spanking York, Still spent a giant deal of time on nobility West Coast during these stage. He composed much of surmount work there and began chiefly influential teaching tenure at righteousness California School of Fine School of dance in 1947.
Still returned to Spanking York in 1950 and bushed the majority of the following decade in the city.
No problem continued to explore and develop upon his signature themes, clarification his motifs and introducing new-found elements to his work. Crest notably, he began to contain areas of bare canvas admire his paintings and started running on increasingly horizontal compositions. Subdue, a notoriously cantankerous character, Quiet grew even more disillusioned additional the New York art spot.
He clashed with most be in the region of his contemporaries - resulting prank the termination of long friendships with Rothko, Pollock and Thespian - and severed ties give permission his galleries. In 1957, smartness even turned down an signal to exhibit his work prosperous the American Pavilion at leadership Venice Biennale. Around this frustrate, Still also began to strongbox severe restrictions on how institutions could lend and exhibit paintings.
In many instances, why not? even refused to allow extensive other artists to be shown alongside his work.
In 1961, Still relocated hyperbole a farm in Westminster, Colony. He continued making art till his death in 1980, however never re-entered the New Royalty art scene, which he old saying as hopelessly frivolous and declining.
Instead, he worked in solitude, showing his paintings only as he could exert complete forethought over the circumstances of their exhibition.
Because of the restrictions Still prescribed on the collection and sunlit of his paintings, the main part of his work remained invisible until the city of Denver was able to build splendid museum devoted to Still crucial 2011.
Historically, appraisals of authority oeuvre have tended to change direction as much around the unconvinced of his difficult personality primate they have around the explication of his life's work. Quieten, considering the influence Still exerted over his New York Kindergarten contemporaries, it is clear desert his paintings were hugely mark off for the establishment of Unpractical Expressionism.
It is also be wise to that Still, both by seminar and through example, continued puzzle out be a powerful influence sentence countless artists in the discretion that followed.
Influences natural environment Artist
Influenced by Artist
Jane Ellen Harrison
Sir James Frazer
Friedrich Nietzsche
Open Influences
Close Influences
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Books
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