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with vision. And the Act, intrinsic and absolute, was its meaning, and the bearer of its passion."
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Photo - Clyfford Still Sandra Still
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It was in this sense that he wished his often gigantic and always untitled paintings to be read, with their jagged and imperious forms, their headlong and inventive color, their limitless sense of scale and their refusal to deal in any way with the world as it presets itself in everyday life." His concern, as he saw it, was with truths of the spirit that could not be put into words.

Not every judge was convinced that Mr. Still's work lived up to his apocalyptic ambitions. Writing in The New York Times on the huge Met retrospective, Hilton Kramer saluted Mr. Still's "visionary space, inhabited by immense structures of jagged, flamelike forms," as "one of the truly original inventions of modern painting." But he also said that 'considered strictly as an artistic phenomenon in itself, Mr. Still's art is curiously limited. Despite the outsize scale on which he works, the artist does not impress one as an outsize talent. His sensibility strikes one as crabbed, even small-minded, and woefully Puritanical in its fundamental attitude toward the medium in which he works. Only a master on the order of Monet or Matisse could sustain a show as vast as this one."

Clyfford Still was born in Grandin, N.D., on Nov. 30, 1904. In 1905, his family moved to Spokane, Wash. Mr. Still's father was an accountant, and in 1910 he moved to southern Alberta in hopes of

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 Andre Breton) and 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 saw it as essential to combat the influence of what he called "that ultimate in iront, the Armory Show of 1913, which had dumped upon us the combined and sterile conclusions of western European decadence."

'Dig Out the Truth'

Powered by his unalterable convictions - "Dig out the truth," he once said, "and one man is a match for all of them" - he set out to "envision, create and think through" an idiom of his own that would be adequate to express the new truths of the spirit that he wished to lay before the world. When eventually he was satisfied that he had achieved a total psychic entity in his canvases, he felt " bounded only by the limits of my energy and intuition." "My feeling of freedom was now absolute and infinitely exhilarating."

In 1943, he met Mark Rothko at the house of a friend in Oakland. When he moved to New York in 1945, after two years' teaching in Richmond, Rothko came uninvited to his studio. What he saw excited him so much that he introduced Mr. Still to Peggy Guggenheim, who included a large black painting by Mr. Still in the Autumn Salon of October 1945 at her New York gallery. She gave him a one-man show four months later, and in April 1947 Mr. Still had the first of his two one-man shows at the Betty Parsons Gallery.

Mr. Still regarded these exhibition in New York as forays into fundamentally corrupt and hostile territory. "In these two arenas some 15 years ago," he wrote to a friend in 1959, "there was shown one of the few truly liberating concepts that man has ever known. There I made it clear that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implication, could restore to man the freedom lost in 20 centuries of apology and devices for subjugation."

THough touched by any mark of approbation that seemed to him genuine, Mr. Still was ever wary of dealers, critics, curators and other artists. He set himself standards of probity, integrity, privacy and self-sufficiency that made him particularly sensitive to the suggestion that he could in any way be called an associate of other artists, let alone a member of a school. As he saw it, he had lived a solitary adventure. His work was his alone, and owed nothing to anyone else.

But as more and more people came to prize his work, it happened that some of them wanted to annex it for the theory or that as to how the "new American painting" had come about. Mr. Still regarded much of that painting as belated, opportunistic and in many cases derived from himself. He said quite flatly that it was him that Rothko had developed his mature style.

Exhibitions on Own Terms

After World War II, Mr. Still continued to teach from time to time, and especially at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, where his graduate painting class became famous. Though as ever adamant in his refusal to exhibit on any but his own terms, Mr. Still did allow a large exhibition of his work to be held at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1959. He later presented a large group of his paintings to the gallery.

He also sanctioned a smaller show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in Philadelphia in 1963, and in 1976 there was an exhibition of 33 of his paintings, 28