Clyfford Still
Clyfford Still | |
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Color Field painting | |
Spouse(s) | Lillian August Battan Still (c. 1930 – late 1940s) Patricia Alice Garske Still (1957–1980) |
Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American
Biography
Still was born in 1904 in
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.[4]
In 1941 Still relocated to the
Mark Rothko, whom Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to
Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the
Family life
Still married Lillian August Battan circa 1930. They had two daughters, born in 1939 and 1942. The couple separated in the late 1940s and divorced in 1954. In 1957, Still married Patricia Alice Garske, who had been one of his students at Washington State and was sixteen years his junior.[8]
Paintings
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
Exhibitions
In 1943, Still's first solo show took place at the
Awards
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.[14]
Estate and Museum
Still wrote a will in 1978 that left a portion of his work, along with his archives, to his wife Patricia and stated: "I give and bequeath all the remaining works of art executed by me in my collection to an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art and assure their physical survival with the explicit requirement that none of these works of art will be sold, given, or exchanged but are to be retained in the place described above exclusively assigned to them in perpetuity for exhibition and study."[8] After Still's death in 1980, the Still collection of approximately 2,400 works was sealed off completely from public and scholarly access for more than twenty years.
In August 2004, the City of Denver, Colorado announced it had been chosen by Patricia Still to receive the artworks contained within the Clyfford Still Estate (roughly 825 paintings on canvas and 1575 works on paper – drawings and limited-edition fine-art prints). The Clyfford Still Museum, an independent nonprofit organization, opened under the directorship of Dean Sobel in November 2011. The museum also houses the complete Still archives of sketchbooks, journals, notebooks, the artist's library, and other archival materials, inherited upon Patricia Still's death in 2005.[15]
The building was designed by Allied Works Architecture, led by Brad Cloepfil.[16][17] The museum is recognized as a successful implementation of contemporary architecture and an icon for the city of Denver.[18] From January 24 to April 17, 2016, the Denver Art Museum hosted a temporary exhibit called "Case Work", which showcased the design process used for this museum and other major works by Allied and Cloepfil.[19][18] After Denver, the exhibit was planned to show at the Portland Art Museum and then embark on a two-year international tour.[20]
In March 2011, a Maryland court with jurisdiction over Patricia Still's estate ruled that four of Still's works could be sold before they officially became part of the museum's collection.[21] In November 2011, Sotheby's in New York sold the four works; PH-351 (1940) for US$1.2 million, 1947-Y-No. 2 (1947) for US$31.4 million, 1949-A-No. 1 (1949) for US$61.7 million and PH-1033 (1976) for US$19.6 million.[22] The proceeds from the sales, US$114 million, went to the Clyfford Still Museum "to support its endowment and collection-related expenses."[21][22] In the decade prior to the sale, only 11 of Still's works came up at auction.[22] The Clyfford Still Museum opened on November 18, 2011.
In December 2011, a visitor to the museum was accused of causing $10,000 worth of damage to Still's 1957-J no.2 oil painting.[23]
In 2013, the Clyfford Still Museum Research Center was launched. Its aim is to explore the period of art and history in which the abstract painter worked. Plans include a fellowship program, cross-disciplinary scholarly publications, and research symposia.[24]
Other collections
- Albright–Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York (33 paintings, 1937–1963
- San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (30 paintings, ca. 1936–1974)
- Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (12 paintings, 1943–1977)[25]
- Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (8 paintings, ca. 1935–1962)
- Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
- The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
- Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
- Tate collection, London (on loan to Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art)
- Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller Empire State Plaza Art Collection, Albany, New York
- The Kreeger Museum, Washington, D.C.
- Glenstone, Potomac, Maryland
- Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut
Quotes
From Still
"I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit."
"It's intolerable to be stopped by a frame's edge."[26]
"I am not interested in illustrating my time. A man's 'time' limits him, it does not truly liberate him. Our age – it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mechanism of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of a graphic homage."[27]
"How can we live and die and never know the difference?"
From others
- "Still makes the rest of us look academic." --Jackson Pollock[28][29]
- "His show (at Peggy Guggenheim's The Art of This Century Gallery in 1946), of all those early shows [Pollock, Rothko, Motherwell], was the most original. A bolt out of the blue. Most of us were still working through images ... Still had none."--Robert Motherwell[30][31][32]
- "When I first saw a 1948 painting of Still's ... I was impressed as never before by how estranging and upsetting genuine originality in art can be."--Clement Greenberg, art critic; "American-Type Painting", Partisan Review, 1955, p. 58.
- "It was in the mid-1940s that Still asserted himself as one of the most formally inventive artists of his generation."
- --John Golding, art historian; Paths to the Absolute, 2000, Princeton University Press
- "With their crude palette-knifed and troweled surfaces, their immense space, their strong color, their relentless vertical and horizontal expansiveness, Still's abstract works project a forcefulness perhaps unequaled in Abstract Expressionistpainting."
- --Stephen Polcari, art historian; Abstract Expressionism and the Modern Experience, 1991, Cambridge University Press
- "A singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime."--Robert Hughes, former Time art critic; Time, Prairie Coriolanus, February 9, 1976
See also
Notes
- ^ Kramer, Hilton (6 July 1980). "ART VIEW; the Singularity of Clyfford Still". The New York Times.
- ^ "The Artist". Clyfford Still Museum. Retrieved 21 October 2014.
- ^ "Clyfford Still". The Phillips Collection. Archived from the original on January 22, 2010. Retrieved 21 October 2014.
- ^ "Archived copy" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-06-29. Retrieved 2020-01-03.
{{cite web}}
: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p.112
- ^ Lawrence Gowing, ed., Biographical Encyclopedia of Artists, v.4 (Facts on File, 2005): 654.
- ^ Maryland SDAT listing for Still Farm property http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/details.aspx?AccountNumber=07%20032161%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&County=07&SearchType=STREET[permanent dead link] retrieved 4 April 2013
- ^ a b c Van Dyke, Jeffrey (November 2011), Clyfford Still's Unyielding Will, 5280, retrieved 30 March 2013
- ^ Maryland SDAT listing for Still New Windsor House http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/details.aspx?AccountNumber=11%20011365%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20&County=07&SearchType=STREET[permanent dead link] retrieved 30 March 2013
- ^ Hochfield, Sylvia (1 January 2009), Revealing the Hidden Clyfford Still, ARTnews, retrieved 30 March 2013
- ^ Whiting, C. (2008). Pop L.A.: Art and the City in the 1960s. United Kingdom: University of California Press. p. 34.
- ^ Clyfford Still, 1948 (1948) Guggenheim Collection.
- ^ Clyfford Still Tate Collection.
- ^ a b Clyfford Still Guggenheim Collection.
- ^ Kino, Carol (17 November 2011). "Abstract Expressionist Made Whole". The New York Times. Retrieved 21 October 2014.
- ^ MacMillan, Kyle (18 November 2011). "With wraps off the art at new Denver museum, how good is Clyfford Still?". The Denver Post.
- ^ MacMillan, Kyle (26 October 2011). "Installation of more than 100 artworks begins at Clyfford Still Museum in Denver". The Denver Post.
- ^ a b Rinaldi, Mark Ray (January 31, 2016). "Brad Cloepfil and Clyfford Still Museum make case for design in Denver". Lifestyles. The Denver Post. p. 1E. Archived from the original on 2016-02-01. Retrieved January 31, 2016.
- ^ Allied Works Architecture (2016). Case Work Premieres at the Denver Art Museum
- ^ Denver Art Museum (2016). Case Work: Studies in Form, Space & Construction by Brad Cloepfil / Allied Works Architecture, through April 17, 2016.
- ^ a b "Court Greenlights Clyfford Still Museum's Creative Maneuver to Sell Off Four Paintings". ARTINFO. 28 March 2011.
- ^ a b c Crow, Kelly (10 November 2011). "Sotheby's Sells Group of Clyfford Still Paintings for $114 Million". The Wall Street Journal.
- ^ Coffman, Keith (5 January 2012). "Colorado woman accused of damaging $30 million painting". Reuters.
- ^ Pobric, Pac (October 30, 2013), Clyfford Still Museum opens research centre Archived 2013-11-01 at the Wayback Machine The Art Newspaper.
- ^ Works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
- ^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 123
- ^ Clyfford Still, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1976, p. 124
- ^ Sheets, Hilarie M. (12 April 2016). "Rare Loan of Clyfford Still Paintings to Join Royal Academy Show". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
- ^ Stonard, John-Paul (3 September 2016). "Abstract expressionism – not just macho heroes with brushes". The Guardian. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
- ^ Brown, David (6 April 2012). "All-to-his-own museum for America's greatest unknown painter, Clyfford Still". The Washington Post. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
- ^ Madoff, Steven Henry (18 March 2007). "ART; Unfurling the Hidden Work of a Lifetime". The New York Times. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
- ^ Baker, Brett (23 April 2012). "The Drawings of Clyfford Still". Painter's Table. Retrieved 22 March 2018.
Further reading
- Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still's 'Replicas', David Anfam and Neal Benezra and Dean Sobel. Publisher: Clyfford Still Museum Research Center (2015), ISBN 978-0-9856357-3-2
- Clyfford Still: The Artist's Museum, David Anfam and Dean Sobel. Publisher: ISBN 978-0-8478-3807-3
- Nancy Marmer, "Clyfford Still: The Extremist Factor," Art in America, April 1980, pp. 102–113.
- Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944–1960, James T. Demetrion (Editor). ISBN 978-0-300-08969-1
- Clyfford Still: ISBN 0-87099-213-9
- Sheets, Hilarie M. (6 November 2011). "Clyfford Still, Unpacked". Art in America.
- Clyfford Still: The Late Works, David Anfam. Publisher: