The city he chose, and the estate he sealed

For a man who refused the art world, Still made one large exception, and it explains where this painting hangs. The provenance, the documented chain of who has owned a work from the artist’s hand to now, is short here. Still painted 1957-D No. 1 in 1957. Two years later, in 1959, it was acquired and given to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, by Seymour H. Knox, Jr., the museum’s board president, whose name is on the credit line to this day: Gift of Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1959.

That gift was the start of a bond between the wary painter and one museum. The Albright-Knox’s director, Gordon M. Smith, and Knox courted Still’s trust over years, and in 1959 Smith handed Still complete control to stage his first large-scale museum survey, the show that broke his seven-year public silence. Satisfied with how Buffalo handled his work, Still later gave the museum 31 of his own paintings in 1964 (a separate event from Knox’s 1959 gift, and easy to confuse with it). Between the two, Buffalo became the great public holder of his art for decades. The institution is the same one, expanded and renamed the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2023, where 1957-D No. 1 hangs now.

Buffalo got what it got because Still trusted it. Almost everything else, he sealed away. He kept the bulk of his output out of galleries and out of sale during his lifetime, and willed it intact to a single American city, on the condition it be kept together. So when he died in 1980, the vast majority of what he had made, roughly 95% of his lifetime output (something on the order of 825 paintings, plus well over a thousand works on paper), was simply unseen. It stayed that way for three decades, until the Clyfford Still Museum opened in Denver in 2011, built to house that sealed estate and finally show it.

It is a fitting end for the painting and the man. The picture refuses to be a designed image, refuses a title, refuses to explain; the painter refused the galleries, refused the critics, and refused to let most of his work be seen at all on anyone’s terms but his own. 1957-D No. 1 is one of the few he let out into the world, and it carries the whole stance in it: a wall of torn black, nine by thirteen feet, that asks nothing of you and hands you nothing, and waits to be stood in front of.