Art: The Aloof Abstractionist

Cantankerous Clyfford Still lives like a hermit, has no dealer, rarely lets anyone buy his work without his personal approval, and as much as possible forbids exhibiting his work in group shows. Now, drawn by the chance to show at the University of Pennsylvania's Institute of Contemporary Art, where he has found a congenial teaching task, Still is exhibiting 32 major oils rarely seen before. They show that at 58 he ranks among the few skilled practitioners of abstract expressionism.

Picked from a quarter century of his production, the paintings comprise Still's life statement, which is roughly that of the DON'T TREAD ON ME FLAG. He has apparently found personal liberty—at the expense of being at odds with the outside world. "I'm not interested in illustrating my time," he says. "Our age is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death. I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of graphic homage."

Cubism's Alternative. Still was born on a North Dakota farm, got an M.A. from Washington State University. During World War II he drew blueprints; afterward, with Mark Rothko, he drew disciples to the avant-garde California School of Fine Arts, teaching the first serious alternative to cubism in recent art history.

Not until he was 41 did Still have a one-man show. And only a few years later, unlike his close friend Jackson Pollock, he withdrew from what artists not so affectionately call "the arena," or marketplace, to a small farm near Baltimore. His living room is floored with linoleum, and an aging DeSoto is parked in front of his garage. Inside is his one known materialist obsession—a lovingly polished vintage Jaguar touring car.

In the late 1930s, Still was given to Freudian imagery—cyclopean-eyed totems and phallic horns. Suddenly in his 1943-A (see opposite page), all signs, symbols and literary allusions vanished. Still laid tubes of red and yellow against his surface and squeezed out streaks of lightning. Then he began slathering ever larger canvases with brutal expressions of his own will, great slabs of paint laid on almost as thick as bas-relief.

Sooty Icing. "To be stopped by a frame's edge was intolerable," says Still in characteristically irascible terms. "A Euclidean prison had to be annihilated." He does not frame his canvases because they do not end where his paint does. Some of his best adventures in paint occur close to the edges, where colorful jigsaw puzzle pieces are chopped off as if they had turned the corner into a new dimension. Other oils seem to spread relentlessly outward and upward like aerial photography of an erupting volcanic landscape.

More than any of his contemporaries, Still believes art is an exertion of man's freedom against a hostile world, a machete in the jungle. Such a tool is his latest work shown, 1963-A, bristling with black fury like a thunderhead. It is swathed onto raw canvas with his palette knife like sooty icing, with only flecks of lavender and blue to serve a lighter side. It is also a darkling mirror of Still's personality. As he says, "Painting must be an extension of the man, of his blood, a confrontation with himself. Only thus can a valid instrument of individual freedom be created."