Prairie Coriolanus

If there is an eminence grise among living American artists, that man is Clyfford Still. The history of abstract expressionism, the movement that did most to coalesce the once frail identity of American art, is unimaginable without his vast Wagnerian canvases. But 15 years have passed since Still quit Manhattan in disgust for a ten-acre farm in Westminster, Md., and during that time his execrations of the "arrogant farce" of the art world--its neuroses, its museums, its critics, and their failure to come to grips with his work--have not ceased to be heard. He is the Coriolanus of painting.

Flinty Intransigence. The result is that Still has become a respected enigma. He is seen as a model of flinty intransigence, and looks it: a gaunt, atrabilious figure of 71 with a cutting eye, he has managed to control the fate of his work more effectively than any other artist of his generation. He still owns nearly all his output, going back over four decades and comprising thousands of paintings, all closely documented and indexed. Still's canvases rarely find their way onto the market. He will not sell them except to the few collectors and fewer museums he approves of (the average U.S. museum, in Still's view, is a "glorified comfort station"), and until now there has been only one place where Still's work could be seen in any depth: the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, to which he gave a group of 31 paintings in 1964.

Thus Still's complaints about being misunderstood have, to a certain extent, been self-fulfilling: there has always been a lack of public evidence of his work. But he is today in a position to state his terms to almost any museum director in the U.S. One consequence of this is the remarkable show currently on display in San Francisco. In 1975 Still presented 28 paintings to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, on the understanding that they be permanently hung as a group. In part this was a gesture to the city where Still worked in war industry and as an art teacher in the '40s. The gesture is of some magnitude, since artists (unlike collectors) get no tax write-offs for giving their own work to public museums.

From now on, the student of Still's work must go to San Francisco; the museum has an unequaled collection of it, ranging from an emaciated and muddily impasted striding figure painted in 1934, to a trio of enormous canvases done 40 years later. The early work is of special historical interest. It illustrates Still's cubist affinities then--a painting like PH-591, which dates from 1936-37, with its sinuous line meandering among black planes, is like a Braque made with an ax--but it also shows the common root of interest in biomorphic and mythical imagery shared by Rothko, Newman and other abstract expressionists, out of which would grow Still's passion for the sublime.

Elementalism is the recurrent mood of Still's paintings. Many abstract-expressionist canvases allude, directly or not, to landscape. No American artist, however, has so consistently dealt with epic landscape as North Dakota Emigre Still. He is not, of course, a literal landscapist (sky at top, earth below). Yet there is every reason to see in his work a splendid addition to the romantic tradition of landscape, as practiced in Europe from Turner to Van Gogh and in 19th century America by the Hudson River School: a sense of vast, brooding presences, a pantheistic immanence, flickering with energy and heavy with foreboding.

The big fields of color in Still's paintings do not directly represent the spaces of the Midwest, any more than the jagged profiles and vertiginous falls and splits of color represent the Rockies. Yet the fundamental American sense of landscape--vast space conferring freedom--is unmistakably there. Cataracts of ultramarine blue, gorges of orange and cadmium yellow, a patch of blue appearing like the blind eye of a lake: color becomes iconography.

Singular Talent. Still has written about his preference for "the vertical rather than the horizontal; the single projection, instead of polarities; the thrust of the flame instead of the oscillation of the wave." This was partly meant to separate his work from the tradition of the School of Paris, which was all balance and harmonious composition. But in such remarks, as in the work, one catches the note of true terribilit`a that lies beneath the grumpy face Still turns to the public.

One could easily present Still as a caricature by Ayn Rand, a bombinating superman nourishing himself on rocks and vinegar. But what is the point? The paintings remain: they are enveloping in scale, impressively consistent in their growth, utterly free of triviality, the products of a singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime.

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