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THE NEW YORK TIMES, WEDNESDAY, JUNE 25, 1980

CLYFFORD STILL DIES; A LEADING PAINTER

Called 'Abstract Expressionist,' He Felt He Was a Man Apart - Had Record Exhibition

[[painting]]
One of Clyfford Still's paintings, "Untitled"

By JOHN RUSSELL

Clyfford Still, one of the foremost American painters of the century and a man known for his fiery and uncompromising attitudes in all matters relating to his art, died of cancer Monday in Sinai Hospital in Baltimore. He was 75 years old.

From Nov. 17, 1979, to Feb. 3, 1980, Mr. Still was the subject of the largest one-man exhibition ever devoted to a living artist by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was an apotheosis on the scale of Rubens or Tintoretto: 78 paintings, many measuring well over 100 square feet, and a catalogue in which he deployed all his very considerable powers of invective in castigating the art-world establishment of the previous 50 and more years.

Mr. Still knew no compromise. In every one of his paintings, he manifested a lofty and implacable ambition. Though many historians ranked him wih Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman among the founders of what is known as the Abstract Expressionist school, he saw himself as a man set apart. Rather than build on what he regarded as an effete and fraudulent European tradition, he set to work to exemplify a specifically American sublimity. In speaking of it, he used the language not of art history but of a visionary preacher.

'No Respite or Shortcuts'
"It was a journey," he once said of his long career, "that one must make, walking straight and alone. No respite or shortcuts were permitted. One's will had to hold against every challenge of triumph, failure or the praise of Vanity Fair, until Imagination, no longer fettered by the laws of Fear, became as one with Vision. And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, was its meaning, and the bearer of its passion."

It was in this sense that he wished his often gigantic and always untitled paint [[photograph]] [[article cut off]]

making a better life on land newly made available for homesteading by the Canadian Government. He kept his house in Spokane, however, and Clyfford was educated at the Edison Grammar School in Spokane and spent much of his boyhood there.

Never in doubt that art would be his first interest in life, he drew and painted from an early age.

In 1925, he paid his first visit to New York, where his lifelong disposition to follow a path of his own choosing led him to walk out of the Art Students League after a being a student for exactly 45 minutes. He said later, "The exercises and results I observed I had already explored for myself some years before and rejected as a waste of time."

In 1935, Mr. Still formulated the position to which he remained faithful for the rest of his life. "I realized," he wrote later, "that I would have to paint my way out of the classical European heritage. I rejected the solution of antic protest and parody (Picabia, Duchamp, and the theorist André Breton) and of the adaptation of foreign cultures (Picasso, Modigliani) which became popular through the 1910's and the 1920's. The mechanical and technological themes of the Bauhaus that marked the Central European ethic I rejected out of hand as an abdication to systems of power and mass control." Mr. Still - [PAGE CUTS OFF] - of them the artist's gift to the museum, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Though more and more reclusive in his ways, he accepted a number of honors. In 1972, he accepted the American Academy's offer of its Award of Merit for Painting medal, though he turned down the cash prize that went with it. The same year, he was given an honorary doctorate by North Dakota State University, and in 1975, he accepted the Skowhegan Medal for Painting. In 1976, he received an honorary doctorate from the San Francisco Art Institute, and in 1978, he was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

As to the eventual importance of Mr. Still's achievement opinions can legitimately vary; but those present at his Metropolitan show were left in no doubt that they had been fortunate enough to meet one of the great irreducible Americans.

Mr. Still is survived by his wife, Patricia, and two daughters.