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拍品专文
A radical vision of the sublime, Clyfford Still’s PHX-14 is an exceedingly rare early masterpiece from the father of Abstract Expressionism. Executed during a crucial year for Still, PHX-14 captures the artist just past the threshold of his mature abstraction, made upon his first arrival to New York. His inspired originality—with loose and sweeping gestures of warm pigment morphing into pulsating forms that breathe and reverberate out from the picture plane, his surfaces exhaling color to envelop their external environments—immediately captured the attention of the New York art world, enrapturing Peggy Guggenheim who hastened to organize a solo show for the West Coast artist. Clement Greenberg locates this period as “about the time that Clyfford Still emerged as one of the most original and important painters of our time—and perhaps as more original… than any other in his generation” (“‘American-Type’ Painting” in Partisan Review, Spring 1955, p. 221). Still’s fastidious control over his oeuvre insured that ninety-four percent of his extant works remained with his estate, deposited with the Clyfford Still Museum; of the remainder, barely sixty works remain in private hands, the present painting is the only work from this critical year—which witnessed Still’s invention of a unique mode of application and development of a compellingly novel stylistic signature—to ever come to auction.
This brief, pivotal period monumentally impacted the development of the New York School, Still evincing what Greenberg describes as “the first serious abstract pictures I ever saw” and significantly shaping Mark Rothko’s and Barrett Newman’s development toward their abstract idioms (ibid., p. 221). Of exceptional provenance, the present work is one of two Still paintings acquired directly from the artist by his close friend, the American hard-edge painter John Stephan, and remained in his collection until 2003. The work was included in Yale University Gallery’s 2002 exhibition The Tiger’s Eye: The Art of a Magazine, in homage to Stephan’s influential cultural magazine The Tiger’s Eye.
PHX-14 compels the gaze, drawing the viewer inward, its strokes and pigments gesturing to the unspeakable translated both instantaneously and slowly across time. The work contains a stately choreography of weighted and kneaded passages of color in organic hues, burnt oranges, creamy whites maneuvering around the bravely employed chasm of deep black cutting across the composition as a yawning abyss. For Still, “black was never a color of death or terror,” but instead “warm and generative” (quoted in K. Kuh, “Clyfford Still” in J.P. O’Neil, ed., Clyfford Still, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979, p. 11). Here, the black plane centers the composition, with the other areas seeming to both surge through and yet be transformed by space, dematerializing the previous dichotomy between form and space which upheld modern painting, and providing instead a new vernacular where the two conceits are now indistinguishable .
Underlying the work is an energetic tidal rhythm surging back and forth across the composition. The jagged edge of the flamelike black form cuts across and into the softly articulated expanse of off-white, whilst simultaneously containing the vividly voluminous garnet red expanding out and across the left side of the picture pane. The two parallel notes of burnt orange laid linearly overtop the upper left corner assimilate the black and garnet zones together, narrowing the color contrast via the repetitious shape edges deployed to overlap the two areas. The black exerts a gravitational pull upon the rightward forms, whose vast expanses of Tuscan tan and apricot gradually seep, tide-like, into the white, their progression only briefly delayed by the vertical white passage at the center right. The artist’s metaphoric draftsmanship enlivens the canvas through his expert wielding of his palette knife, his oils flickering and convulsive, his forms both static and careering vertically out of the picture plane. Seen here is the complete reinvention of the sublime through the orchestral interaction of avowedly nonrepresentational forms; art historian and curator Katharine Kuh describes the effect as “having nothing to do with landscape or any possible subject, they frankly exploit all possible means to make the painting itself the entire experience. The painting is the sum total and to search beyond that is to invalidate the meaning of the work” (ibid.).
Still arrived in New York for the first time during the summer of 1945, having spent the previous two years teaching in Virginia. The artist’s emergent abstraction had already been treated to a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his previous acquaintance with Mark Rothko led to an introduction to Peggy Guggenheim, whose immediate passion for Still is evinced by the rapidity in which she showed his work at her Art of This Century gallery—first, in her Autumn Salon the same year, and then a solo exhibition which opened in February 1946. Rothko wrote the exhibition catalogue to the latter, noting that Still had achieved his revolutionary abstract style while “working out West—and alone,” and that his art was “of the Earth, of the Damned, and of the Recreated” (First Exhibition—Paintings; Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Art of This Century, New York, 1946, n.p.). Utterly devoted to his calling as an artist, Still moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, momentarily using his small kitchen as a studio. His daughter Diane evocatively records his dedication, which she witnessed during a trip to visit her father in 1945: “when I awoke sometime in the middle of the night, I saw my father painting at an easel in the kitchen” (D. Still Knox, “Foreword” in D. Sobel and D. Anfam, eds., Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum, New York, 2012, p. 8). It was in this frenzy of movement that Still painted PHX-14, articulating for the first time the abstract style which deconstructed his previous work. As David Anfam aptly surmises: “his old preoccupation with arid earth hot suns, bloody hands, frigid and benighted lives became transfigured in his final three and a half decades into a visual poetry of drought and fire, luminosity and obscurity” (“Still’s Journey” in ibid., p. 96). One sees the painter’s evolution from just a year earlier, when he painted Jamais, now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The Guggenheim work’s Surrealist figuration serves as a prelude to PHX-14, the black figure morphing into Still’s signature black chasm, while the yellow vertical striations are translated directly into the central passage. This translation bears witness to an artist deeply versed in figurative art’s finalized formation of an abstract vernacular.
The artist considered PHX-14 to be a breakthrough arriving at his mature style. Two years later, he created a replica of the work for his personal record, which is now held in the Clyfford Still Museum. Still only made fifty-nine replicas across his career. The artist describes his idiosyncratic process, stating that “making additional versions is an act I consider necessary when I believe the importance of the idea or breakthrough merits survival on more than one stretch of canvas” (quoted in Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still’s Replicas, exh. cat., Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, 2016, p. 14 ).
Still was born in North Dakota and spent a peripatetic childhood across North America’s great Western expanse, moving between Alberta, Canada and Washington State. Still’s abstract works evoke this Western setting, embodying the spirit and mythos of the West as a place where nature and the supernatural comingle, a space of emptiness and eminence, destructive violence and inner rebirth. His canvases are at their heart paysages moralisés, each work a simulacra of a landscape, its subject the human condition rather than nature. Still paints with a directness which achieves the sublime, succeeding with the artist’s self-proclaimed aim to “show that this instrument, the limited means of paint on canvas, has a more important role than to glorify popes and kings or decorate the walls of rich men” (quoted in op. cit., p. 96). PHX-14 is an eloquent initiation of Still’s mature abstraction, announcing for the first time the artist’s ground-breaking abstract style which forever altered the New York art world.
This brief, pivotal period monumentally impacted the development of the New York School, Still evincing what Greenberg describes as “the first serious abstract pictures I ever saw” and significantly shaping Mark Rothko’s and Barrett Newman’s development toward their abstract idioms (ibid., p. 221). Of exceptional provenance, the present work is one of two Still paintings acquired directly from the artist by his close friend, the American hard-edge painter John Stephan, and remained in his collection until 2003. The work was included in Yale University Gallery’s 2002 exhibition The Tiger’s Eye: The Art of a Magazine, in homage to Stephan’s influential cultural magazine The Tiger’s Eye.
PHX-14 compels the gaze, drawing the viewer inward, its strokes and pigments gesturing to the unspeakable translated both instantaneously and slowly across time. The work contains a stately choreography of weighted and kneaded passages of color in organic hues, burnt oranges, creamy whites maneuvering around the bravely employed chasm of deep black cutting across the composition as a yawning abyss. For Still, “black was never a color of death or terror,” but instead “warm and generative” (quoted in K. Kuh, “Clyfford Still” in J.P. O’Neil, ed., Clyfford Still, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1979, p. 11). Here, the black plane centers the composition, with the other areas seeming to both surge through and yet be transformed by space, dematerializing the previous dichotomy between form and space which upheld modern painting, and providing instead a new vernacular where the two conceits are now indistinguishable .
Underlying the work is an energetic tidal rhythm surging back and forth across the composition. The jagged edge of the flamelike black form cuts across and into the softly articulated expanse of off-white, whilst simultaneously containing the vividly voluminous garnet red expanding out and across the left side of the picture pane. The two parallel notes of burnt orange laid linearly overtop the upper left corner assimilate the black and garnet zones together, narrowing the color contrast via the repetitious shape edges deployed to overlap the two areas. The black exerts a gravitational pull upon the rightward forms, whose vast expanses of Tuscan tan and apricot gradually seep, tide-like, into the white, their progression only briefly delayed by the vertical white passage at the center right. The artist’s metaphoric draftsmanship enlivens the canvas through his expert wielding of his palette knife, his oils flickering and convulsive, his forms both static and careering vertically out of the picture plane. Seen here is the complete reinvention of the sublime through the orchestral interaction of avowedly nonrepresentational forms; art historian and curator Katharine Kuh describes the effect as “having nothing to do with landscape or any possible subject, they frankly exploit all possible means to make the painting itself the entire experience. The painting is the sum total and to search beyond that is to invalidate the meaning of the work” (ibid.).
Still arrived in New York for the first time during the summer of 1945, having spent the previous two years teaching in Virginia. The artist’s emergent abstraction had already been treated to a solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and his previous acquaintance with Mark Rothko led to an introduction to Peggy Guggenheim, whose immediate passion for Still is evinced by the rapidity in which she showed his work at her Art of This Century gallery—first, in her Autumn Salon the same year, and then a solo exhibition which opened in February 1946. Rothko wrote the exhibition catalogue to the latter, noting that Still had achieved his revolutionary abstract style while “working out West—and alone,” and that his art was “of the Earth, of the Damned, and of the Recreated” (First Exhibition—Paintings; Clyfford Still, exh. cat., Art of This Century, New York, 1946, n.p.). Utterly devoted to his calling as an artist, Still moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, momentarily using his small kitchen as a studio. His daughter Diane evocatively records his dedication, which she witnessed during a trip to visit her father in 1945: “when I awoke sometime in the middle of the night, I saw my father painting at an easel in the kitchen” (D. Still Knox, “Foreword” in D. Sobel and D. Anfam, eds., Clyfford Still: The Artist’s Museum, New York, 2012, p. 8). It was in this frenzy of movement that Still painted PHX-14, articulating for the first time the abstract style which deconstructed his previous work. As David Anfam aptly surmises: “his old preoccupation with arid earth hot suns, bloody hands, frigid and benighted lives became transfigured in his final three and a half decades into a visual poetry of drought and fire, luminosity and obscurity” (“Still’s Journey” in ibid., p. 96). One sees the painter’s evolution from just a year earlier, when he painted Jamais, now in the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. The Guggenheim work’s Surrealist figuration serves as a prelude to PHX-14, the black figure morphing into Still’s signature black chasm, while the yellow vertical striations are translated directly into the central passage. This translation bears witness to an artist deeply versed in figurative art’s finalized formation of an abstract vernacular.
The artist considered PHX-14 to be a breakthrough arriving at his mature style. Two years later, he created a replica of the work for his personal record, which is now held in the Clyfford Still Museum. Still only made fifty-nine replicas across his career. The artist describes his idiosyncratic process, stating that “making additional versions is an act I consider necessary when I believe the importance of the idea or breakthrough merits survival on more than one stretch of canvas” (quoted in Repeat/Recreate: Clyfford Still’s Replicas, exh. cat., Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, 2016, p. 14 ).
Still was born in North Dakota and spent a peripatetic childhood across North America’s great Western expanse, moving between Alberta, Canada and Washington State. Still’s abstract works evoke this Western setting, embodying the spirit and mythos of the West as a place where nature and the supernatural comingle, a space of emptiness and eminence, destructive violence and inner rebirth. His canvases are at their heart paysages moralisés, each work a simulacra of a landscape, its subject the human condition rather than nature. Still paints with a directness which achieves the sublime, succeeding with the artist’s self-proclaimed aim to “show that this instrument, the limited means of paint on canvas, has a more important role than to glorify popes and kings or decorate the walls of rich men” (quoted in op. cit., p. 96). PHX-14 is an eloquent initiation of Still’s mature abstraction, announcing for the first time the artist’s ground-breaking abstract style which forever altered the New York art world.