Clyfford Still

During the 1940s Clyfford Still began to paint large-scale, expansive abstractions that evoked the vast landscapes he encountered during his youth in Washington State and Alberta, Canada. In canvases such as Untitled he used jagged, interlocking planes of thickly layered paint that recall the craggy forms of mountains and caverns, or the conjunction of earth and sky, while remaining resolutely abstract and mysterious. Like many of Still’s works, Untitled is impressively scaled—more than nine feet high and twelve feet long—and utilizes a palette of deep blacks animated by swaths of vibrant color, balanced by large areas of seemingly bare canvas.

With works such as Untitled, Still became linked to the Abstract Expressionist painters who rose to prominence during the 1950s, especially artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who similarly composed their works from fields of color. However, Still eschewed associations with any movement. Believing that participation in the commercial activities of the art world compromised the integrity of the artist and his work, he conceived of himself as an outsider and carefully controlled the exhibition and sale of his paintings. Likewise, he made ambitious claims for his canvases as a critique of modern consumer culture, describing them as “an assault upon the concept of the picture as a value object . . . a repudiation of the mechanistic ethic and technological rationale of our culture.” The counterpoint to Still’s rejection of modern values was his evocation of the sublime and timeless drama of the natural world. With its serrated forms, immense scale, and brooding palette, Untitled conveys awe—and perhaps unease—at nature’s dynamism and magnitude.