Word: clyfford
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...nature as a source of metaphor, as in the pantheistic paintings of Arshile Gorky; sometimes its sources lay hidden in the unconscious, as with Pollock. Except for de Kooning and Franz Kline, most of the Abexers--Gorky, Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, William Baziotes, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still--saw the socially grounded activist art of the 1930s, whether Nativist like the Regionalism of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton or left-wing Social Realist, as provincial, shallow and irrelevant. "Poor art for poor people," sniffed Gorky. They wanted to dive deeper. They valued the primordial, the spiritual...
...shortcomings as a conspectus of modernism become apparent, though it contains some fine things: for instance, a great fauve Matisse, the 1905 Woman with the Hat, and one of the most beautiful of all early Pollocks, the 1943 Guardians of the Secret. It has good groups of pictures by Clyfford Still and Philip Guston, but strangely enough it is relatively weak where it should be rock solid-in San Francisco art. Most of the top Bay Area names are represented-Wayne Thiebaud, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, David Park, Manuel Neri, William Wiley and so on-but not always with works...
Moskowitz's vividly imposing red windmill alludes to Mondrian's great early paintings of that motif. The side of the Yosemite cliff in The Seventh Sister, 1981, recalls Clyfford Still and, through that, the American Romantic tradition of heroic landscape. Such works do not escape the second-handedness that comes with quoted images, but at least they are quite without smug prophylactic irony...
...style during the 1940s and '50s. Though its base was New York City, the abstract-expressionist ethos pervaded every artistic center in the U.S., including the San Francisco Bay area. There, during the late '40s, a flourishing local school had been influenced by the forceful presence of artist-teachers Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko...
...with the slight condescension that implies. He is, quite simply, one of the best painters America has ever produced. He began as an abstract painter, making organic, landscape-like images in an idiom related to abstract expressionism; one of his inspirations, though in the end an adversary one, ! was Clyfford Still, a colleague at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco in the late '40s. Then in 1956 he turned to representational painting, believing that his work could only develop out of a closer contact with the world's body. The grand synthesis of the two came after...