EXHIBITIONS

Inaugural Exhibition

The Museum's Inaugural Exhibition, on display through September 2012, establishes a chronology of Clyfford Still's 50-year career. Arranged according to the locations where they were created, the works provide an overview of the artist's primary imagery and his dramatic stylistic progression.

The exhibition focuses especially on work made between the mid-1920s and the era surrounding World War II in the 1940s, a time when Still lived principally on the west coast. The culmination of this period is embodied in his "abstract expressionist" works which he developed further in New York in the 1950's and in Maryland after 1961.

While aspects of nature and the landscape are evident in Still's images, this exhibition also proposes the importance of the figure throughout Still's art, even in his most outwardly abstract works. Late in his career he remarked, "the figure stands behind all my work."

ALBERTA, CANADA: 1925–early 1930s

Though born in North Dakota, Clyfford Still spent the first 35 years of his life in the barren prairies of the eastern Washington State and central Alberta, Canada, where his family had farms. His earliest works were made primarily in Killam, Alberta, beginning in the mid-1920s through the early 1930s. These images depict the people and places that comprised this agricultural region, including scenes of bustling labor and buildings and machine forms set against the austere landscape.

The early works are important both for their relationship to American Scene painting (Depression-era art that depicts daily life) but also for how they relate to Still's later art, particularly his early use of chiseled planes of intense color and a desire for monumental grandeur.

image: PH-619, 1930-31

PULLMAN, WASHINGTON: 1933–41

Clyfford Still spent the last half of the 1930s in and around Pullman, Washington, where he studied art and humanities at Washington State College. After receiving his master's degree in 1935, he joined the faculty to teach art and art history.

The subjects in Still's paintings of this time are mostly farm scenes, now executed in an increasingly expressionistic style. Unlike the many upbeat images of labor made by diverse American artists during the Great Depression. Still seems committed to revealing the physical, emotional and even psychological effects of hard work.

Still's art was advancing quickly. By 1936-37 he began to simplify his subjects as he moved closer to abstraction. Passages that once described anatomy or landscape now reappear as carefully executed arrangements of line, color, and interlocking shapes.

image: PH-77, 1936

PULLMAN, WASHINGTON and OAKLAND, CALIFORNIA: 1937–early 1940s

A more somber and complex approach characterizes many of Still's works of the late 1930s and early 1940s. Human subjects have been replaced by creature-like protagonists. Totems, bone fragments, quasi-figures, and other vertical elements are set against nocturnal backgrounds, giving these compositions an ominous, even nightmarish quality. Remnants of vegetation (grasses, shafts of wheat) and farm tools, imagery held over from his imagery early in the 1930s, are also evident.

In 1941, Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in shipyards as part of the war industries effort to help boost the United States from the Depression. While Still's output decreased at this time, his art continued to advance in inventive and highly original ways.

image: 1944-A (PH-751), 1944

FIRST ABSTRACTIONS: Early 1940s

Beginning in the fall of 1943, Still taught at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, where he synthesized many of the ideas he had been developing over the previous ten years. Lines and shapes that once described the figure or landscape were freed from their representational origins. Still had reached a radical abstraction.

These works establish that Still's art embodied many of the characteristics of Abstract Expressionism by 1942, earlier than his contemporaries, including Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Willem De Kooning, and Robert Motherwell, who continued to paint in figurative modes well into the 1940s.

Still left Richmond in early 1945 and moved briefly to New York City, where he met artists and others connected to the New York art world.

image: 1944-N-No. 1 (PH-235), 1944

SAN FRANCISCO: 1946–mid-1950

In 1946, Still returned to the San Francisco Bay area and began an important tenure at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute. This was a tremendously fertile period in which his paintings gained new power through vibrant colors, jagged forms, and heavily encrusted surfaces.

While in San Francisco, Still continued his associations with New York-based artists and galleries and became a key figure in the burgeoning movement known as Abstract Expressionism. The artists associated with this highly influential movement helped establish the United States as a cultural leader following World War II.

image: PH-118, 1947

NEW YORK CITY: 1950–1961

In mid-1950, after several years of moving between the East and West coasts, Still began an 11-year residency in New York City.

The scale of Still's art increased dramatically during the 1950s. Still wanted his paintings to engulf the viewer's field of vision and to be experienced as environments. Still's works in the 1950s are also marked by jagged, "locked-in" shapes created from gigantic fields of bold color. In several instances, the forms are punctuated by small dabs of color. Areas of bare canvas also take on a lager role, suggesting that Still believed emptiness and void could be as expressive as densely painted areas.

image: PH-1123, 1954

WORKS ON PAPER

The Clyfford Still Museum collection contains roughly 1700 drawings and other works on paper executed in graphite, charcoal, pastel, crayon, pen and ink, oil paint, gouache (an opaque watercolor medium), and tempera (pigments bound with egg yolks and water), as well as limited-edition etchings, woodcuts, and silkscreens.

Still rarely exhibited or distributed his works on paper, yet they provide substantial clues to the source of imagery presented in his paintings. In some cases, paintings grew directly out of drawings or sketches, but the opposite was also true, underscoring that his works on paper were not preparatory steps, but fully realized artworks in their own right.

image: PH-455, 1949 Gouache on paper

MARYLAND: 1961–1980

In 1961, Still moved to rural Maryland where he lived until his death in 1980. Working in seclusion dedicated solely to his art, his works of the 1960s and 1970s are marked by a lighter touch and color, as well as an economy of imagery.

Though Still began to explore the expressive qualities of empty space in the late 1950s, his use of bare canvas reached its zenith in these late paintings. Implied movement also became more vivid, as if painted forms are being set in motion by invisible forces.

image: PH-929, 1974

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