Arts and Letters

In 1972, several months after Clyfford Still had received the Academy's Award of Merit, he wrote a letter of thanks in which, true to form, he took issue with something Richard Lippold had allegedly said in the citation. For the record, Still either had not read the citation, or else was misinformed as to exactly what it said, or perhaps he just misconstrued the remark. Unhappily it is now not his either to accept or reject this tribute although there is reason to wonder whether Still's cosmology would enable us to be sure that this is really so.

However we as individuals may react to Still's paintings, however history ultimately chooses to dispose of him, a number of facts remain. Clyfford Still was one of the most original and influential artists of our time; stubborn and uncompromising in all matters relating to his art; cast in the mold of figures like Ezra Pound and Richard Wagner—he had boundless faith in himself—in his art and in his ideas; obsessed with the need to work everything out on his own and for himself, he rejected not only all of his contemporaries but also all of the past; totally committed to his own ideas of freedom, he was also one of the canniest and most acute artists this country has ever produced. Though for nearly four decades he excoriated the art world and all that goes with it—artists, critics, dealers, collectors, and institutions—he nevertheless skillfully played on their individual and collective susceptibilities until in the end he must have achieved much of what he wanted to do.

Having ventured this far into territory which is patently not mine, I must secure my flanks. Still's originality, or to borrow Hilton Kramer's more apt description, "his singularity," is in some important aspects very much tied to both time and place as well as to tradition. Since the middle of the nineteenth century many artists have felt it necessary or expedient to accompany their work with public pronouncements. Unlike the anonymous, silent craftsmen who first groped toward the Gothic arch or hit on the techniques of perspective, or the composers who first employed invertible counterpoint or experimented with sonata form, the newer movements in the arts, and particularly those associated with the avant-garde, have been loudly self-trumpeted and widely publicized in every possible way. Society has come increasingly to accept this behavior on the part of artists. So much so, that in many instances the manifesto became as important as the work of art itself.

In the case of Still there is no question but that the art is what is more important. It is, however, very much easier to quote Still's statement to Gordon Smith about "a journey that one must make walking straight and alone," than it is to verbalize meaningfully about his paintings. The connection between the paintings and his comments about them do suggest an interesting relationship. Still never gave his pictures titles—he always noted the medium and added a date and number—this, I presume, to forestall any association with the perceived world outside the picture. (Had he pushed this procedure to its logical limits he would also have eliminated both year and number, not to mention the signature which is generally quite clear.) By contrast, his words are full of poetic images, sermon-like statements, and phrases more than occasionally reminiscent of Blake's prophetic books. I think that one might easily and perhaps almost at random snip out groups of words from Still's writings and affix them as titles to his pictures. I have also frequently felt that by looking at his pictures and reading what he wrote about them, an interaction between words and pictures takes place. Each can illuminate the other, and the words may readily supply a stimulus to the imagination which art viewers frequently can find so helpful.

We cannot be entirely certain how Still wanted us to view his pictures; he appeared at times uncertain himself, as when he writes of "the works by my hand called paintings." One has the impression that he did not see them as objects coming within the limits of what is commonly termed art. He seemed to regard them as comparable to scientific discoveries about the nature of the universe, or as philosophical insights into the nature of being. Most frequently, perhaps, he thought of his pictures as political acts. This becomes very clear in what he once wrote to the critic Kenneth Sawyer about his early exhibitions in New York:

It is one of the great stories of all time, far more meaningful and infinitely more intense and enduring than the wars of the bullring or the battlefield—or of diplomats, laboratories, or commerce. For it was in two of those arenas some thirteen years ago that was shown one of the few liberating concepts man has ever known. There I had made it clear that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apologies and devices for subjugation.

I don't know who would go along with such a statement. I wonder whether even his most ardent disciples could take these words at face value. Yet Still wanted all of us to believe this. Fortunately much of the force and intensity of his words is present and apparent in his work. It is this for which we must be happy. It is this we can celebrate.

A sense of space, a sense of deep isolation, of gravity, of infinite yearning are the sensations evoked in many of us by his dematerialized forms which never duplicate nature. It is all this together with an incredible sense of unfettered individualism that Clyfford Still so eloquently expressed.