Description

In the late 1940s Clyfford Still, along with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, originated the type of Abstract Expressionism known as color-field painting, a term used to describe very large canvases dominated by monumental expanses of intense, homogeneous color. Like most of Still’s mature work, Untitled is a sheer wall of paint, imposing and self-sustaining, that makes no concessions to conventional notions of beauty or pictorial illusionism. This painting’s textural effects give it an insistent, complex materiality. Dominated by blacks applied with both a trowel and brushes, the surface is by turns reflective and chalky, granular and smooth, feathery and leaden. These variegated black surfaces are even more emphatic because their continuity is broken by areas of blank canvas and white paint. Like veins in igneous rock, streaks of orange, yellow, and green paint are embedded in the black voids. Mediating between the light and dark masses are areas of crimson, heightened at the edges, as if inflamed, by bright orange.

Provenance

The artist; with J. Patrick Lannan, New York, by Dec. 3, 1958 [correspondence with artist in curatorial object file]; sold to J. Patrick Lannan, New York, Mar. 1959 [correspondence with artist in curatorial object file]; gifted to The Lannan Foundation, Lake Worth, FL, later Los Angeles, June 8, 1981; partially given and partially sold to the Art Institute of Chicago, Feb. 24, 1997.

PH-774

Clyfford Still

1958

Accession Number

146991

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

290.2 × 406.4 cm (114 1/4 × 160 in.)

Classification

oil on canvas

Museum

The Art Institute of Chicago

Chicago, United States

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; Roy J. and Frances R. Friedman Endowment; through prior gift of Mrs. Henry C. Woods; gift of Lannan Foundation

Background & Context

Background Story

Clyfford Stills PH-774 from 1958 belongs to the period when the artist was producing his most austere and monumental canvases, reducing the already radical format of his earlier work to an even more elemental confrontation between color and void. By 1958, Still had largely abandoned the complex interweaving of multiple color fields that characterized his paintings of the late 1940s, moving toward compositions in which a single dominant color field is interrupted by one or two jagged vertical forms. In PH-774, the interaction between the dominant field and the interrupting forms creates a tension that is simultaneously geological and metaphysical: the forms read as both landscape elements seen from an aerial perspective and as spiritual presences in an abstract space. Still applied paint with palette knives and his own hands, building up thick impastos that create a physical terrain on the canvas surface, a relief map of the emotions that generated the painting. The scale of the work (Still typically painted on canvases measuring eight feet or more in height) means that the viewer is surrounded by color rather than observing it from a distance, creating an experience of total immersion that Still described as an encounter with the conditions of human existence. The PH numbering system identifies this as one of approximately 800 works that Still produced over a fifty-year career, a rate of production that reflects the extraordinary deliberation with which he approached each canvas.

Cultural Impact

Stills late paintings of the 1950s, including PH-774, represent the culmination of Abstract Expressionisms ambition to create paintings that function as environments rather than objects. Their influence on the development of installation art, environmental sculpture, and immersive color experiences extends far beyond the painting tradition into architecture and new media.

Why It Matters

An austere late-period painting by Still in which a dominant color field is interrupted by jagged vertical forms, creating an immersive encounter that reduces abstract painting to the elemental confrontation between color, form, and the conditions of human existence.

Related Artworks

PH-246