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Clyfford Still. Untitled, 1957. Oil/canvas, 112x154". Collection The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of the Friends of the Museum

Carter Ratcliff:
"The Structure of Color" at the Whitney Museum takes one back to the bland exterior of modernist style. Here is a large accumulation of paintings and sketches each of which shows or is intended in this context to show a step along the way to completely "pure", abstract color. Abstract color is divorced from the rest of esthetic color, a category which includes representational and expressionist color; that disintegration depends on the prior divorce of esthetic color from ordinary color; that depends on the divorce of color perceptions from the totality of seeing; that depends on the divorce of perception from the rest of experience so that it can be dominated by concept and all these categories can be kept in order. this show and the introductory essay is a "necessary" result of Kant's separation of the esthetic from the rest of experience.

The exercise of detaching color from an already detached vision was initiated consciously by the Impressionists and regularized by the neo-Impressionists.  The latter's Divisionism is aptly titled.  To indicate how inefficient is the idealism behind all this accumulation of fragments from the unity of experience-in the history of modernist color and in this particular exhibit-let me recall that Divisionism was intended to make colors appear brighter by allowing the eye to mix them. This was considered more natural than mixing on the palette, but it was potentially mechanistic and it betrayed a mechanistic idea of the natural as that which could be fully systemized into "clarity". The system worked for those who could engage it-just as color is bright in the greatest Venetian painting where it has been engaged directly and without the help of nineteenth century methods; where there is only the application of a system the colors are gray-in Divisionism or in Venetian paintings.
In "Structure of Color", paintings have been accumulated as if they were fragments to be "unified" in an immense modernist work; the familiar gray pervades this show for it is all system, and it destroys the contrast between good and bad.

Art Int'l May 20, 1971

Only Clyfford Still' large, dark, eccentric, completely unsystematic work survives this context; it does so defiantly, in opposition to it. The painting's defiance is its demand for a context, not a place in a system-and that is what this show fails to provide. In the conclusion to this series of letters, we will turn to painting like Still's which is able under certain conditions to take up a context of its own. (To be continued)

Richard Serra. Moe, 1970. Steel. Lent jointly by the Leo Castelli Gallery, New York and the Helman Gallery, St. Louis. By courtesy: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum