|
Title
Of the Earth, the Damned, and of the Recreated': Aspects of Clyfford Still's Earlier Work
Creation Date
04/1993
Work Creator Name
Anfam, David
Publisher
The Burlington Magazine
Title
Why Still Paintings No Longer Run Deep
Creation Date
04/1993
Work Creator Name
Baker, Kenneth
Publisher
Datebook
Title
An Outsider Inside the Art World
Creation Date
07/12/1993
Work Creator Name
Tarshis, Jerome
Publisher
The Christian Science Monitor
Title
Still Waiting and Waiting and Waiting and Waiting
Creation Date
02/1995
Work Creator Name
Decker, Andrew
Publisher
ARTnews
Title
Report from San Francisco: Bay Area Bravura
Creation Date
09/1996
Work Creator Name
Duncan, Michael
Publisher
Art in America
Title
Isn't It Romantic?
Creation Date
05/09/1998
Work Creator Name
Rosenblum, Robert
Publisher
Artforum
Title
Untitled, 1958 by Clyfford Still
Creation Date
1999
Work Creator Name
Schulman, Daniel
Publisher
Art Institute of Chicago
Title
Cantankerous Clyfford Still's Palette of Green and Black
Creation Date
06/15/2001
Work Creator Name
Kuh, Katharine
Publisher
The Washington Post
Title
American Clyfford Still, Painter of Great Unseen
Creation Date
07/23/2001
Work Creator Name
Kramer, Hilton
Publisher
The Observer
Title
Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960
Creation Date
09/2001
Work Creator Name
Weil, Rex
Publisher
ARTnews
Title
Clyfford Still: The Importance of Being Earnest
Creation Date
10/2001
Work Creator Name
Kunitz, Daniel
Publisher
New York, NY : Foundation for Cultural Review
Title
The Idea of Order in the Art of Clyfford Still
Creation Date
12/2001
Work Creator Name
Ratcliff, Carter
Publisher
Art in America
Title
Still Against Himself
Creation Date
Between June 2001 - September 2001
Work Creator Name
Cooper, Harry
Publisher
Artforum
Title
Clyfford Still's Art: Between the Quick and the Dead
Creation Date
2002
Work Creator Name
Anfam, David
Publisher
Washington, D.C. : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001
Title
Clyfford Still's Replicas
Creation Date
2002
Work Creator Name
Benezra, Neil
Publisher
Washington, D.C. : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001
Title
Introduction
Creation Date
2002
Work Creator Name
Demetrion, James
Publisher
Washington, D.C. : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001
Title
Raw Mineral Jaggedness: A Clyfford Still Legacy
Creation Date
2002
Work Creator Name
Adams, Brooks
Publisher
Washington, D.C. : Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution in association with Yale University Press, New Haven, 2001
Title
Still getting his own way; The late artist Clyfford Still's prickly conditions for showing his work will be met by a new museum in Denver
Creation Date
12/31/2004
Work Creator Name
Weller, Robert
Publisher
Los Angeles Times
Title
Clyfford Still: Art's Angry Man
Creation Date
2006
Work Creator Name
Kuh, Katharine
Publisher
New York : Arcade Publishing
Title
Le Conflit du Cadre et de L'Ecran. Similitude D'Espace et Confrontation de Phenomenalites: John Ford et Clyfford Still.
Creation Date
2007
Work Creator Name
Bonfand, Alain
Publisher
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France
Title
Still Life
Creation Date
04/19/2009
Work Creator Name
Kershner, Jim
Publisher
Spokane Review
Title
Clyfford Still, Unpacked
Creation Date
11/2011
Work Creator Name
Sheets, Hilarie M
Publisher
Art in America
Title
Thus Spake Still
Creation Date
03/2012
Work Creator Name
Perl, Jed
Publisher
The New Republic
Title
Still's Journey
Creation Date
2012
Work Creator Name
Anfam, David
Publisher
New York: Skira Rizzoli
Title
The Cover: Untitled
Creation Date
03/13/2013
Work Creator Name
Cole, Thomas B.
Publisher
Journal of the American Medical Association
|
![Among the founding artists of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, Clyfford Still's pronounced individualism and hostility to State power are routinely acknowledged, but have yet to be critically evaluated in dialog with anarchist currents during and after World War II (fig. 1). David Anfam, who is the foremost authority on Still, has provided a baseline for charting interrelationships by perceptively analyzing how the artist's "Nietzschean brand of individualistic anarchism" shaped his self-conception and aesthetic romanticism, but goes no further.1 More generally, scholarly treatments of Still's art and politics have foregrounded the Cold War as the key issue, to the detriment of anarchism. Susan Landauer, for example, influentially characterized the artist as a reactionary right-winger during the 1990s (more recently acknowledging Still's politics were not right wing, she supports her case with a passing reference to anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth's "later" [1959] critique of the "social lie" by way of comparison).2 Similarly, in Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999), David Craven marshaled Anfam's analysis only to conclude Still's anarchism drew him into an "unwitting convergence with [Cold War] laissez-faire individualism."3 Turning to Ellen D. Landau's codifying anthology, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique (2005), Still is again subsumed into Abstract Expressionism's Cold War reception, with Marxist interpretations of the movement's aesthetics and social significance predominating.4 Katy Siegel, Lillian Davies, and Pauline Pobocha's exhaustive survey, Abstract Expressionism (2011) is similarly silent regarding anarchism as a factor in Still's development.5 The pattern is indicative of how Abstract Expressionism is broadly framed in the [End Page 491] discourse: as a breakthrough "American" style pioneered by leftist-inclined artists in response to World War II and buffeted, initially, by the politics of the Cold War, which was quickly taken up by the art market, canonized as the latest advance in international modernism ("a new art for a new world"), and integrated into museum collections in the United States and Europe.6
Until very recently Still's archive and personal library were unavailable to researchers, and this undoubtedly also played its part in the interpretative lacuna I am drawing attention to. Letters and other documents in the Clyfford Still Museum archive allow an examination of transatlantic anarchism's concern with aesthetic values, art's capacity to serve as a site of social freedom, and the institutional forces arraigned against the movement. Both Still's art practice and views, and his reception in this milieu, matter [End Page 492] for understanding Still's contributions to the politicization of art. Anarchists engaged in cultural networking through "horizontal ties among diverse, autonomous elements" (for example, social centers, editorial groups, activist organizations, and informal friendship circles) coalescing around opposition to authoritarianism in all its forms.7 These fluid, affinity-charged networks generated diversity, which was regarded as a positive value, in accord with anarchism's overarching ambition to institute direct forms of democracy within a decentralized federated system of governance.8 Consequently, Still's aesthetic radicalism and combative stance toward art institutions found a willing audience among anarchists, even as he deliberately marginalized himself from broader social struggles.](https://luna.clyffordstillmuseum.org/MediaManager/srvr?mediafile=/Size1/CSM~21~21/779/Allan_Antliff_--_Clyfford_Still_on_the_Margins_of_Anarchy_0000.jpg)