Untitled
Clyfford Still American
Not on view
Still’s rugged style of color-field painting invites comparison to landscape and recalls the painter’s early years living in the expansive terrain of North Dakota, Washington, and Alberta, Canada. This association applies especially to horizontally oriented compositions, such as this one, in which irregular craggy forms like mighty stalagmites and stalactites, mostly in black and deep red, evoke primordial forces. The artist accentuated the painting’s rocky character by building up areas of the surface with impasto (thick paint) using a palette knife. In 1979, the year before his death, The Met organized a survey of Still’s art—the largest presentation that had yet been organized on his work, and by the Museum on a living artist. In 1986 Still’s widow gave The Met ten paintings by her late husband.
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