The Tempest in the Paint Pot

By ROBERT HUGHES

In New York, a full-dress Clyfford Still retrospective

For the 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 he is almost 75, his work has yet to be adequately studied. All these ingredients--the large talent, the inaccessibility, the crusty pride--have made Still a somewhat mythic figure in American painting and put him in a position to dictate terms to any museum in the U.S. So it is with his current retrospective at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, a panorama of 79 huge canvases, Wagnerian in ambition and theme.

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 idees rec,ues of the official version, are largely borne out by the evidence of his paintings. We see, for instance, how Barnett Newman's much praised early work, with its vertical "zip" down the canvas, was no more than a derivative rehearsal of certain canvases of Still's from 1943 to 1945.

The 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.

Visionary ineloquence has a lot to do with native American culture, being woven into the American sense of the epic--and in painting, Still is its living example. His entire output is a repudiation of the cult of the "well-made picture." From the beginning, Still's art--unlike, say, de Kooning's--set itself in opposition to the cubist tradition with its small scale, ambiguities of space and geometric calibration. What he wanted, and had found by 1947, was a much simpler, grander and more declarative kind of structure: opaque, ragged planes of color rearing up the surface, emphatic in their brush-work--none of the characteristic cubist tonal flicker--and engulfing in their sheer size. If cubism was the art of hypothesis, Still would contradict it with an art of crushing visual fact. In doing so he hoped to make a clean leap out of modernist history into images "not proven by a continuum," as he wrote to a friend in 1950: "I am myself--not just the sum of my ancestors, and I know myself best by my gestures, meanings...not through a study of my family tree." To a great extent he succeeded. Virtually no modernist paintings done before 1945 look like his work, and even the influence of surrealism, a vital catalyst for Pollock and Rothko, is less apparent in Still than anywhere else in abstract expressionism. Instead of going by fits and starts, testing and absorbing other art, Still's career gives the impression of monolithic solidity: he found his style early and stuck to it for more than 30 years. No other artist living today could seem, or be, more self-sufficient.

The tradition to which Still's work is related is heroic landscape, the art of the epic vista, as seen in 19th century America by painters like Bierstadt and Moran. No doubt, in some general way, his years spent under larger skies than Manhattan's, in the Midwest and Pacific Northwest, contributed to the sense of vast atmospheric scale in his art. But to read it directly as landscape violates its meaning. The cliffs and ravines of color, the jagged rifts of blue or vermilion breaking through a matrix of dense enveloping black, are no metaphors of the Grand Canyon or the Rockies, nor do the flickering shapes literally allude to flame or cloud. They are meant to convey a sense of pantheistic energy, of intense mood and vigorously articulated feeling--to substitute, in fact, for nature it self. For Still's admirers, this invites comparison with the greatest lyrical nature cycle in modern art, Monet's Water Lilies. Still's vocabulary is too narrow, his style too hectoring and coarse for that. But to have reached this terrain of feeling, and stayed on it for 30 years, is no mean achievement. It makes Still's Met exhibition one of the outstanding events in art since 1970.

--Robert Hughes

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