Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Clyfford Still
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Sotheby's New York (Exhibition: Icons: Back to Madison)
76%
1949-A-No. 1. 1949. Oil on canvas
The most important element of this artwork is the way that amorphous black central nonform is "tipped" all the way around by untouched canvas. Still is such a tactile, muscular, paint-as-paint painter that to have his masses accented by a very deliberate absence of pigment is to have this painting enervated or even almost feminized — and that's a good thing here. The picture-wide patter of slivers of raw ground is a counterpoint to all the impasto and heady brushwork; it draws the painting back from its edge (while also introducing within it another rhythm). It also unifies the surface of the canvas, which is otherwise so smeared with paint as to seem disunited. As often, there's something both equivocal and overwrought about Still's shapes. They can look like totems invented wholecloth, which is to say they can proffer a significance they don't actually possess. But here as well the speckling of unpainted ground is a boon: it denies the shapes some of their unearned mythicism while accentuating the ways they rhyme without repeating. (TFS, 2025)