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ART + X19
CLYFFORD STILL

His Legend and His Work May at Last Be Compared in a Public Exhibition

By DORE ASHTON
BUFFALO.

THE legend of Clyfford Still-and it is impossible to dissociate him or his work form his legend-can at last be tested against his paintings in an exhibition at the Albright Art Gallery here. Director Gordon Smith is probably the first official ever to invite a contemporary and controversial artist to select, install and catalogue his work in a major museum retrospective. In this novel way the ambiguities inherent in what painters like to call "the museum situation" are circumvented. The artist simply stands or falls by his work.
Still's messianic fervor has led him to eccentricity in the literal sense of the word. He is a solitary, a peculiarly American isolationist savagely jealous of his integrity. He rejects with puritanical righteousness all the organized modes of exhibiting painting, holds himself aloof from the painting community and looks with traditional horror at the sinfulness of the city. The Still legend then is based as much on his attitude as his work. It is quire true that his "attitude" affected the course of American painting, particularly as it concerned Still's students and disciples in San Francisco from 1946 to 1950. With his hell-fire morality, Still trained his students' eyes away from "Western European decadence" in painting in order that they could have what he called a "truly free vision."
yet, at a time when American painting needed to reject and reject to discover itself, it found in Still a courageous, violently committed, rejector. As critic Kenneth Sawyer has written, Still's ascendance over so many younger painters occurred because "he offered them the first alternative to Cubism the new generation could take seriously."
Still's alternative is shown in a twenty-three-year evolution at the Albright. From his first abstractions in 1936 his violence, his ecstatic morality are charted. He began with turbid, lumbering symbols--suggesting gaping maws, clutching hands and vise-like  predicaments--painted with unease.
The echoes of disturbing symbols, sometimes sexual in character, continued to hover for some time. In 1946, Mark Rothko wrote an admiring foreword to Still's show, saying that Still belonged to "the small band of Myth Makers who emerged here during the war." Rothko was able to see ancestral phantasms common to his own work and Pollock's in Still's painting although Still now vehemently repudiates myth and New York painting.
Myth or not, the apparent symbolism in Still's earlier work gave way eventually to a much more oblique symbolism that was to become Still's "style." In place of the monkey-wrench forms, phallic shafts, nimbused figures, came the nonobjective "breakthrough." The spectral symbols become shocking, lightning-bolt rents in immense opaque surfaces. 
Still wanted to portray an unbounded space consonant with his philosophy of esthetic and ethical freedom. To do this, he sometimes laid on enormous areas of a single omnivorous color broken only by an eruptive line, or perhaps two or three lines. In its writhing jaggedness, Still's line suggests a rending of vitals or the predatoriness of vegetal creeping. 
But singular as Still's imagery proves to be, it is presented badly. From a technical standpoint he is remarkably heavy handed. His colors are handled with monotonous consistency, always welling out into repetitive patterns, and always with a kind of double-edged emphasis that breaks the unity of the very surfaces he intends to be air-proof.
The technically "bad" painting may be deliberate, in keeping with till's anti-elegant attitude. But what of the compounding and overstressing of jagged, piercing and erupting forms? What about the driftwood splintering of shape so that there always seems to be on too many ruffles in his compositions?
In many ways these large paintings are products of an excessive sentimentalism of awesome proportions. Their streaked blatancy reminds me of the aggrandized but literal sunsets so dear to nineteenth-century Americans. And perhaps Europeans are fascinated by Still for the same reason Baudelaire was fascinated by George Catlin, noted for his paintings of American Indians. Baudelaire defended Catlin against the barbs of sophisticated critics, admiring his "vast savannahs, deserted rivers" and his use of red, "red, the color of blood, the color of life."
The crude vitalism of Still's paintings might appeal in the same way to contemporary European critics, many of whom have written of him although they have seen few of his works