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Clyfford StillAmerican artist
Date of Birth: 30.11.1904
Country:  USA |
Content:
Clifford Still: The Leader of Abstract Expressionism
Clifford Still, an American artist, was one of the key figures of abstract expressionism. He led the first generation of abstract expressionists who developed a powerful new approach to painting in the years following World War II. Still's contemporaries and like-minded artists included Philip Guston, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Although these artists had significantly different styles and approaches, they shared the use of abstract forms, expressive brushwork, and monumental scale to convey universal themes of creativity, life, struggle, and death, which became particularly relevant during and after World War II. While many specialists consider Clifford Still the most defiant traditionalist among all representatives of abstract expressionism, it was his work that laid the foundation for the entire movement. Still transitioned from representational painting to abstraction between 1938 and 1942, significantly earlier than his colleagues who continued to paint in a figurative-surrealist style throughout the 1940s.
Biography
Clifford Still was born on November 30, 1904, in Grandin, North Dakota. He spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington, and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada. He attended Spokane University and graduated in 1933. In 1935, he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree from Washington State College. In 1934, Still became an invited artist at Yaddo, a unique creative community located in Saratoga Springs, New York. In 1937, together with Worth Griffin, he co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony, which resulted in hundreds of portraits and landscapes painted in the Colville Indian Reservation over four summer seasons. While abstract expressionism is considered a New York movement, Still's style-forming works were created during his time teaching on the West Coast. From 1935 to 1941, Clifford Still taught at Washington State University, and his works from this period feature expressive figurative imagery depicting people, buildings, tools, and rural life. By the late 1930s, he began using simplified forms, moving towards abstraction.
In 1941, Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area, where he worked in various positions in the war industry. He became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts, known today as the San Francisco Art Institute. Still taught in San Francisco from 1946 to 1950, with a summer break in 1948 when he returned to New York. It was during this period that he transitioned to his mature style. Still also taught at the Virginia Commonwealth University from 1943 to 1945. In the late 1940s, Still spent extended periods of time in New York and eventually became associated with two galleries showcasing new American art worldwide: Peggy Guggenheim's "The Art of This Century Gallery" and Betty Parsons Gallery. It was through Peggy Guggenheim that Still met Mark Rothko, and in early 1946, she organized a solo exhibition for the artist. However, Still returned to San Francisco and continued teaching. Nonetheless, he spent a significant portion of the 1950s in New York, where abstract expressionism reached its peak and he became an increasingly significant figure in the art world, though his critical attitude towards the art circles grew. Eventually, Still severed ties with commercial galleries and moved to Maryland in 1961, where he lived the rest of his life with his second wife, Patricia. He passed away on June 23, 1980, in New York.
In 1979, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized the largest retrospective of Clifford Still's work to date. After his death, the works that did not become public property, around 2,400 paintings and drawings, were hidden from public and specialist view, and the world lost access to the works of one of the most significant American artists of the 20th century. However, in November 2011, the Clifford Still Museum opened in Denver, Colorado, allowing visitors to once again see the entire collection.
