Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II.

Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada.

In 1925 he visited New York, briefly studying at the Art Students League.

He attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933.

Still married Lillian August Battan circa 1930.

He spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation (now Yaddo) in Saratoga Springs, New York.

That fall, he became a teaching fellow, then faculty member at Washington State College (now Washington State University), where he obtained his Master of Fine Arts degree in 1935 and taught until 1941.

In 1937, along with Washington State colleague Worth Griffin, Still co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers.

Still has been credited with laying the groundwork for the movement, as his shift from representational to abstract painting occurred between 1938 and 1942, earlier than his colleagues like Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, who continued to paint in figurative-surrealist styles well into the 1940s.

They had two daughters, born in 1939 and 1942.

The couple separated in the late 1940s and divorced in 1954.

In 1941 Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in various war industries while pursuing painting.

He had his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art (now San Francisco Museum of Modern Art) in 1943.

He taught at the Richmond Professional Institute (RPI), now Virginia Commonwealth University, from 1943 to 1945, then went to New York City.

Mark Rothko, whom Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her gallery, The Art of This Century Gallery, in early 1946.

The following year Guggenheim closed her gallery and Still, along with Rothko and other Abstract Expressionists, joined the Betty Parsons gallery.

In 1943, Still's first solo show took place at the San Francisco Museum of Art.

Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), teaching there from 1946 to 1950.

Having developed his signature style in San Francisco between 1946 and 1950 while teaching at the California School of Fine Arts, Still is considered one of the foremost Color Field painters – his non-figurative paintings are non-objective, and largely concerned with juxtaposing different colors and surfaces in a variety of formations.

Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who organized their colors in a relatively simple way (Rothko in the form of nebulous rectangles, Newman in thin lines on vast fields of color), Still's arrangements are less regular.

In fact, he was one of the few painters who combined practices of Color Field paintings with that of Gestural, Action Paintings.

His jagged flashes of color give the impression that one layer of color has been "torn" off the painting, revealing the colors underneath.

Another point of departure with Newman and Rothko is the way the paint is laid on the canvas; while Rothko and Newman used fairly flat colors and relatively thin paint, Still uses a thick impasto, causing subtle variety and shades that shimmer across the painting surfaces.

His large mature works recall natural forms and natural phenomena at their most intense and mysterious; ancient stalagmites, caverns, foliage, seen both in darkness and in light lend poetic richness and depth to his work.

By 1947, he had begun working in the format that he would intensify and refine throughout the rest of his career – a large-scale color field applied with palette knives.

In 1947, Jermayne MacAgy, assistant director of the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, gave him a solo show there.

In 1950, he moved to New York City, where he lived most of the decade, the height of Abstract Expressionism, but also a time when he became increasingly critical of the art world.

In the early 1950s, Still severed ties with commercial galleries.

The artist then declined all public exhibitions from 1952 to 1959.

In 1957, Still married Patricia Alice Garske, who had been one of his students at Washington State and was sixteen years his junior.

Among Still's well known paintings is 1957-D No. 1, 1957 (right), which is mainly black and yellow with patches of white and a small amount of red.

These four colors, and variations on them (purples, dark blues) are predominant in his work, although there is a tendency for his paintings to use darker shades.

A first comprehensive Still retrospective took place at the Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1959.

In 1961 he moved to a 22-acre farm near Westminster, Maryland, removing himself further from the art world.

Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months.

Later solo exhibitions of Still's paintings were presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, New York, in 1969 to 1970.

In 1966, Still and his second wife purchased a 4,300-square-foot house at 312 Church Street in New Windsor, Maryland, about eight miles from their farm, where he lived until his death.

Still received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975.

In 1975, a permanent installation of a group of his works opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

In 1979, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art organized the largest survey of Still's art to date and the largest presentation afforded by this institution to the work of a living artist.