Abstractionist Clyfford Still: ‘A Power for Life--or for Death’

Abstract art is like Tabasco sauce.

This is not just a metaphor; it is a close analogy.

Hot peppers, I am told, provide a sensory experience that changes the sense organ that perceives it. Eat them right from childhood, and they provide a different taste experience to you than to someone who’s new to them. It’s not, I gather, simply that you’ve become more used to how they burn your tongue and so take pleasure in the sensation. It’s that you really feel less of their sting than other people do, or that you may even sense it as a pleasant pungency.

Ditto abstraction--as demonstrated, in all sorts of interesting and complex ways, by the major show of pioneer American abstractionist Clyfford Still at the Hirshhorn Museum.

For Still, who was born in 1904 into a modest family of Western homesteaders, liking art at all, let alone making it, was quite a stretch. Moving on from that to pure abstraction took a good few decades, some trips to New York from his California home, and a lot of courage. That may be why he sometimes seemed to attach more earth-shaking significance to his new form than it could always bear. He insisted that the profoundly pretty pictures that he came to make must also contain a “power for life--or for death.” His genuinely cataclysmic artistic shift from figuration to abstraction had to somehow get mirrored in the metaphysics of his pictures, too--whether they could carry that much freight or not. The novelty of Still’s own abstraction got him overheated, you could say.

Still was one of a small group of American pioneers who, in the years just after World War II, established abstraction as Modernism’s dominant late mode. But Still couldn’t just sit back and enjoy the palpable, complex glories of the visual spectacle that he helped create. Like almost all his Abstract Expressionist friends and peers and rivals--Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman played all three roles at one time or another--Still insisted that there was “more to it” than that. “I made it clear,” said the pathologically immodest artist, “that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in 20 centuries of apology and devices for subjugation.”

Before Still put it to the test, who could ever have guessed that the simple color blue could get as deep, could fill the eye as full, as it does in his “1950-M No. 1”? A huge canvas, the height and width of your average bedroom wall, is almost completely covered with two tones of paint: a classic royal blue, and a barely lighter shade that’s something like the color of a summer sky just before the sun begins to set. But rather than dividing the pictorial labor fairly, the two colors jockey for position right across the surface of the painting. It’s as though two rival painters have been given buckets full of paint, and told to cover the whole canvas: As fast as one puts down one shade, the other splats the second tone on top of it. And then, in case we were to think that this was a pictorial one-liner about the worthiness of blue, Still throws in other elements that nail the whole thing down just right. A dollop of yellow along one edge insists that size isn’t all that counts, and deflates the bombast of all that sober blue. Toward the middle of the canvas, a fleck of red demands an entirely different kind of up-close looking, and so prevents a lazy viewer from settling back to wallow in the rippling waters that float around it.

Other similarly gorgeous pictures, built around fields of black, or yellow, or red, are the gems of the Hirshhorn show. They are as direct, as bold, as deep an exploration of unadulterated beauty as anything that you could come across. They take the kinds of abstract-art decisions we all make every day and distill them to such purity that they become high art. Which is just the kind of praise that Still himself would have abhorred.

Like Pollock and several other heroes of abstract art, Still was a demon of a man. But it’s a mistake to read the makers’ manners into their works, as myths and movies have always wanted us to do. Many of Abstract Expressionism’s best abstractions yield expression that is subtly modulated, even high-spirited, and at odds with the aggressive angst that brought them into being.

Most of Still’s trademark abstractions consist of a background of one color, with variously colored forms plopped down on top of it. Where most of Still’s friends and enemies among the so-called New York School struggled to hammer out pictures that somehow cohere into a radically novel formal whole, Still’s pictures can seem to lack that kind of new internal logic. When painting at his worst, Still simply follows the old rules of composition, with blobs instead of people as his subjects.

Insiders often say that Still has been neglected by posterity. To some extent, Still brought neglect upon himself, giving great clumps of his paintings to smallish institutions in San Francisco and Buffalo, and then forbidding them to travel or be seen alongside other artists’ works. (The show at the Hirshhorn features 39 classic pictures that somehow escaped from Still’s demanding grip during his lifetime. Experts estimate that as much as 90% of Still’s production remains unseen in his estate, pending the founding of the one-man, bookstoreless and cafe-free museum that his executors are aiming for.) But there may be another reason for his perennial status as an also-ran.

Still was a pioneer in his burning support for abstraction, and in many of the genre’s devices. After all these years, however, not too many of the abstractions he turned out have all the spice that the best works of his peers have gotten us used to.