Word: stillness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...York, a full-dress Clyfford Still retrospective...
...past two decades, Clyfford Still has enjoyed a reputation as the Coriolanus of American art. No other living artist has so vociferously loathed the art world as a system. None has managed to keep a closer control over the fate of his work. Since the 1940s, when he emerged as one of the founding fathers of abstract expressionism, Still has jealously guarded his output, releasing few paintings to collectors, rarely showing in private galleries, insisting on conditions of display that few museums were prepared to meet. Consequently, his farm outside Westminster, Md., houses most of his immense oeuvre; and though...
...Still's sense of mission is, to put it mildly, imperial. "I had made it clear," he wrote in 1963, "that a single stroke of paint . . . could restore to man the freedom lost in 20 centuries of apology and devices for subjugation." The Met's catalogue is stuffed with this kind of rant and salted with fulminations against the demons of the "corrupt" art world that make the Ayatullah's views on the Shah seem, by comparison, mere tickling. Nevertheless, Still's notes on the history of abstract expressionism, which sharply contradict some...
...case against Still's work, such as it is, is not hard to make...
Everything seems conducted at the same oratorical volume, whereas in the greatest romantic painters (Turner, for instance, or, in our own century, Pollock), there is a wide range of feeling, apportioned and understood, between the small, exactly registered perception and the grand, generalized effect. Still's colors tend to repetition, the drawing is clumsy, and the paint surface is often crude; he has a way of crushing his pigments into clots and straggles of shiny impasto that works badly against the mat ground. Thus his visual language can look dour and forced...