Lot Essay
By the late 1940s, the Abstract Expressionists began to expand the size of their paintings to mural-scale proportions. 1955-D is a classic example of large-scale, color field painting, the innovative and radical movement of the fifties embodied by the work of Still. It was at this time that Still began to stress completely the impact and quality of visual expression through color. He thereby simplified his canvases by eliminating any references to the secular in an effort to focus the viewer on a world consisting primarily of color. Still insisted on the freedom this methodology would provide: a clear break from traditional and accepted notions of what painting was and how it was to be executed, and the potential for a new starting point in aesthetic expression.
In the fifties, [Still] increasingly opened up the picture by lightening the textures and by simplifying the field...He also keyed up his palette. Such color-fields as 1955-D are more sensuous than before, but they are also sternly majestic, among the grandest works of the period (I. Sandler, "Clyfford Still--Emerging from Eclipse," New York Times, Dec. 21, 1969).
Like Irving Sandler, critic Sam Hunter also believed 1955-D to be a supreme example of the artist's paintings, stating that "the nuanced, sensuous surface of...Clyfford Still's monumental untitled red painting create[s]...immense color fields of extraordinary intensity...[1955-D] is certainly one of his most rapturous and original flights, creating a scarcely modulated field of fiery red enlivened by palette-knife marks, faintly discernible shifts in tone and hue, and broken by a fragile, crooked line drifting down the jagged face of the enveloping color surface. Few paintings made by the artist are as masterful in execution, unrelenting in bright chroma or demanding in this scale. Earlier examples of Still's uncompromising color painting broken by fragile lines profoundly influenced the direction taken by the equally distinctive and exalted color field paintings of Rothko and Newman, and may, in fact, be viewed as the ancestors of Newman's famous linear divisions, or 'zips'" (S. Hunter, Masters of the Fifties: American Abstract Painting from Pollock to Stella, New York 1985).
In the fifties, [Still] increasingly opened up the picture by lightening the textures and by simplifying the field...He also keyed up his palette. Such color-fields as 1955-D are more sensuous than before, but they are also sternly majestic, among the grandest works of the period (I. Sandler, "Clyfford Still--Emerging from Eclipse," New York Times, Dec. 21, 1969).
Like Irving Sandler, critic Sam Hunter also believed 1955-D to be a supreme example of the artist's paintings, stating that "the nuanced, sensuous surface of...Clyfford Still's monumental untitled red painting create[s]...immense color fields of extraordinary intensity...[1955-D] is certainly one of his most rapturous and original flights, creating a scarcely modulated field of fiery red enlivened by palette-knife marks, faintly discernible shifts in tone and hue, and broken by a fragile, crooked line drifting down the jagged face of the enveloping color surface. Few paintings made by the artist are as masterful in execution, unrelenting in bright chroma or demanding in this scale. Earlier examples of Still's uncompromising color painting broken by fragile lines profoundly influenced the direction taken by the equally distinctive and exalted color field paintings of Rothko and Newman, and may, in fact, be viewed as the ancestors of Newman's famous linear divisions, or 'zips'" (S. Hunter, Masters of the Fifties: American Abstract Painting from Pollock to Stella, New York 1985).