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22 C The New York Times, Wednesday, January 20, 1971

Instant Art Defined By Clyfford Still
By David L. Shelby
In this age of instant history, artist, like movie stars, are made overnight and are just as quickly forgotten. Their art, which is more often novelty than innovation, is suddenly canonized, only to be excommunicated soon after. Clyfford Still, now 66 years old, calls the artists of today "popes and cardinals who float to the top because they're light-weights."
Still himself is a heavy-weaight of the modernist spirit, one of the celebrated pioneers of abstract expressionism, who did not float right to the top. Until 10 years ago, Still says that the most people considered him a "primitive, clumsy piece of nonsense coming out of nowhere."
Even though Still's only concern all his life has been "my freedom," never a meal ticket, his canvases are now at a premium on the art market. One recently brought $60,000 on the Parke-Bernet auction block and some fetch as much as $80,000 a canvas.
An Influential Innovator
As for recognition, Still is now estimated as one of the most influential innovators among the abstract expressionists and there are few dealers, collectors and curators who have not beaten a path to his door for pictures and exhibitions. One is Joseph Hirshhorn, the well known philanthropist and collector, who just purchased , it was recently reported, several Still canvases for a special Still room in his new Washington museum, now under construction because he never curried favor for it and sometimes spurned it downright. When the Whitney Museum offered him a "little left-over space" to put a canvas of his of his in a group exhibitions, he categorically refused. The Museum of Modern Art "lived around the corner from me for 10 years," he says. "I didn't go to them and they didn't come to me." Even when Mark Rothko and Barnet Newman, fellow abstractionists, told him he "should stick my fist in the public's face" and "lead the parade down Fifth Avenue," Still answered: "I'd never die for a status symbol,"
Still rarely grants interviews, but when he does, he doesn't miss a chance to cut loose on the art world. In a recent interview at his home in Westminister, Md., where Still moved more than 10 years ago to get away from New York, "that miasma of evil, culture quacks and charlatans," Still denounced museums as the "biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American scene," art critics as "bonehead bullies and Vassarettes," and collectors as "boobs who usually never buy anything until it's famous."
Refuses Contracts
Dealers, he say, "have a revenge which is vicious if you don't let them love you." He occasionally turns his scorn on art itself and condemns such such contemporary movements as pop and earth art, which are respectively, a "mutual conning for the masses" and "something farmers have been doing better for years." His greatest nemesis— one that almost haunts him— is the Bauhaus, "that totalitarian tyranny that led to much of the worthless prerab art we see today."
To get away from the art world, Still not only moved to his present Victorian colonnaded house in the country but also has repeatedly refused gallery contracts and has rarely ever shown his paintings. His show at New York's Marlborough Gallery last year was his first exhibition in New York City in 18 years. He has slammed his door in the face of many dealers and once bodily threw one out. He has preferred to keep his canvases for himself and throughout the years has allowed  only 150 onto the market. "I occasionally sell when I badly need the money," he says.
Recalls Canvases
Most of Still's house is occupied by his works, dating from 1923 to the present. More than 2,000 oils on canvas, some as long as 15 feet, pastels, drawings and lithographs are stacked up to the high ceilings and piled up on the floors. Since a still canvas can bring as much as $80,000, the probable value of his works is, he says, about 60-million.
As Still walks through the

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Sandra Still
Clyfford Still at his home in Westminister, Md.

house, he touches a canvas on the wall or pulls one from a stack or pile, always with delicacy, and says: "This is from my early years in the West." "This is from 1946. Now you know where a lot of the artists got their ideas!"
Without a visit to Still's house, it is impossible to get an idea of his total work. "To understand Beethoven, you have to hear more than one sonata," says Still. "It's only by seeing the totality of a man's life that you can get a measure of it." The only measure anyone can get now is through an occasion-al picture in museum or by a visit to Buffalo's Albright-Knox Gallery to which Still gave 31 canvases in 1959 on the condition that they always hang together without other artists' canvases. "I don't like cross-section minestrones," he says.
Still would have given other works that he had lent to the gallery if he had not heard that they were lying in water in a storage bin. He recalled the paintings. "No one kicks my works in the shins," he admonishes, running his hand through his shimmering white hair and flashing his bright hazel eyes. Once Still thought a fellow artist had in some way kicked one of his canvases in the shin and Still stalked into the artist's house and cut his own canvas out of the frame with a knife. "I'd rather let my work burn than let certain people have it," he insists.
It is only natural that Still would want the credit that he believes is due him: that history recognize how he as a teacher from 1946 to 1950 changed the San Francisco School of Fine Arts from a monastery of academics into one of the most important art schools in the country; that his first shows in New York in the late 40's at the gallery of Peggy Guggenheim, his first mentor, and Betty Parsons be adjudged for their pivotal pictorial importance and that influences be properly determined. "The stakes for such truth are high—immortality," he says.
Whatever course history may take, Still continues to paint. "I'm breathing, by God!" he exclaims. "I have enough pictures in me for 15 lifetimes. I make two and they roll 4 and then 8. I'm never completely satisfied and must go on to the next picture. In my studio a man can build his own soul." And Still still signs that soul, his paintings with his first name, a habit that he picked up when he was young so as not to embarrass his parents that he was an artist.