The painter who quit the room

In the New York of the late 1940s and 1950s, a loose group of American painters were making the first art movement the United States could call its own, the one we now call Abstract Expressionism (abstract, meaning it pictures no recognizable thing; expressionist, meaning the picture is about feeling and force rather than likeness). Jackson Pollock dripped and flung paint across canvas on the floor. Mark Rothko stacked soft, glowing rectangles of color. Barnett Newman split a single field of color with a thin vertical stripe he called a “zip.” And among them, by reputation the least clubbable and most combative of them, was Clyfford Still(1904–1980), a painter from the rural northern plains who trusted almost no one and explained almost nothing.

Still was furiously independent, by temperament and on principle. He came to see the whole system that surrounds painting, the commercial galleries that sell it, the critics who interpret it, the collectors who trade it, as a machine that compromised the work and the viewer alike. So in the early 1950s he started pulling out of it. He cut his ties with commercial galleries. He declined to show his work in public from roughly 1952 to 1959, nearly seven years of silence in the middle of his most productive decade. He refused to explain his paintings, and he refused to give them descriptive names. In 1961 he would move to a farm near Westminster, Maryland, and step out of the New York scene almost entirely.

That refusal extended even to the titles. Still would not call a painting Black and Yellow or Sublime or anything that pointed at a subject or a mood. Instead he used flat, neutral codes built from the date: a year, a letter, a number. The painting in front of us is named 1957-D No. 1, which tells you only that it was made in 1957 and nothing else. He said so plainly: he wanted his pictures “without titles of any kind,” because, in his own words, he wanted no “allusions to interfere with or assist the spectator.” A title is a hint, and Still refused to hint. You were to stand in front of the paint with no story handed to you, and deal with it on its own terms or not at all. These date-codes are not the same as the “PH” numbers sometimes attached to Still paintings. “PH” stands for PHotograph, an inventory number for the order in which works were photographed, a librarian’s tool, not the artist’s title. 1957-D No. 1 is a date-code, not a PH number.

So this is the man whose painting we are about to read: someone who walked out of the gallery, padlocked the explanations, stripped the titles down to a date, and dared you to make something of the silence. The picture is the same gesture as the life.