Page 19 - Studio International - February 1973

Abstract Expressionism II fragmentation' and 'European rationalism'.47
Even during the forties Cubism was
potentially suspect as a source for the
`rationalizations' of concrete or geometric
Charles Harrison art.) Still also seems to have committed
himself earlier than any of the other painters
to the notion of the particular significance of
the wall-sized painting. The remarkable
7 Clyfford Still to encourage them, together with Gottlieb, 1944-N No. I measures 105 in. in height and
For most of the forties de Kooning and in their development of a strategy of myths. 92 1/2 in. in width; apart from Pollock's Mural,
Pollock seem to have been the figures among By the mid forties, if not much earlier painted for a particular space, there are few
the Abstract Expressionists around whom the (Still has always been highly 'inaccessible' and works of the mid forties which even approach
critics and younger artists mostly orientated very little has been established about his early this size, and certainly none by Rothko,
themselves.42 They have served to represent work and life), Still's work was about as free Newman or Gottlieb. Still's art was already
rival claims among their interpreters43, as must then have seemed possible from any uningratiating and uncompromising at the time
although de Kooning, at least, does not seem sense of self-conscious confrontation with of his first New York showing : 'The anxious
himself to have been governed by a sense of post-cubist problems. (It is significant that at men find comfort in the confusion of those
rivalry (vide his often quoted statement that it least one literate American artist of a much artists who would walk beside them. The values
was Pollock who 'broke the ice' for the others). younger generation, Don Judd, has made an involved, however, permit no peace, and
Significantly, Clyfford Still's first one-man implicit association between 'cubist mutual resentment is deep when it is
show in New York, at Art of This Century in
1946, was seen by at least one interested
contemporary, Peter Busa, as representing
a kind of possibility outside the alternatives
offered by de Kooning and Pollock: 'In my
book, Still's quiet hand created the critical
distance we needed; from the anti-art
gestures, from Surrealism, from French
painting and from de Kooning's painting as
well. Also his was an attitude markedly
different from Pollock's.'44
By 1946 Still's work was already highly
distinguished and in a manner which
seemingly owed little to French painting.
Certainly no other American painter in that
year could have put together so consistent
and so consistently individual a show.
Greenberg has noted affinities to Turner and to
Monet in the use of 'sheer or close-valued
colour'.45 These particular affinities can also
be expressed in terms of a common
jaggedness and 'dryness' of outline, both of
form and of actual brush- or knife-stroke,
though such characteristics are as easily found
in Ryder's painting or even in certain early
twentieth-century American cubist-
expressionist works as in the paintings of
the Europeans. What is significant is that by
as early as 1944 Still had identified his art - and
himself as an artist - with a particular highly
non-Mediterranean tradition of 'heroic' or
`sublime' Romanticism; a quality far more
`Germanic' than 'French' - Nietzsche rather
than Valery, Rilke rather than Mallarmé.
Gottlieb and Rothko expressed a similar
orientation in their writings of 1943-4746 but it
was not until 1947 that Rothko's paintings
showed a relevant distinctness, and later in the
case of Gottlieb. Rothko and Newman were too
individual and ultimately too self-sufficient to
have been very dependent on Still's example,
but undoubtedly Still's work impressed
earlier than theirs, and he must have served

Clyfford Still
Untitled 1953
93 x 68 in.
Tate Gallery, London
53