Of two artists
on display at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, one is very popular and
well known; the other is hardly known at all. When you hear the name Georgia
O’Keeffe, you tend to immediately think of the wrinkle-faced old painter who
lived in the desert and painted flowers. But when you hear the name Clyfford
Still, the head cocks a little to one side, your brow gets a little scrunched,
and you ask, “Who?”
When asked to
name a 20th-century abstract expressionist, typically we think of Jackson
Pollock or Mark Rothko, maybe even Barnett Newman or Robert Motherwell. But
Still? Right now, 33 paintings, the world’s largest public collection of
Still’s work, are on view at Albright-Knox. And, although they’re in close
proximity to the O’Keeffe installation, they’re in a series of galleries more
spacious than those allotted to O’Keeffe.
But they have to
be. The paintings are huge, and with their dynamic, flame-like imagery, they
were crucial to the development of abstract painting. So why are the galleries
where Still’s work hangs practically empty? The O’Keeffe galleries, for which
you need to buy a special admission ticket, are full. Most of the people in
those galleries don’t even venture across the way to see Still’s. They’ve come
to see the visually pleasing landscapes of O’Keeffe’s beloved New Mexico. Why
is that? Is O’Keeffe a better artist? Are her paintings more beautiful?
O’Keeffe was one
of the American pioneers of modernism whose paintings, for all of their
naturalistic precision (and economy of detail), are regarded as formal
abstractions. She once remarked, “Nothing is less real than realism… Details
are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination… that we get at the real
meaning of things.”
Well,
that explains it: The work of O’Keeffe is actually representational. She painted from nature. She looked at something
and made an interpretation of it. It was her own vision of something that was
real. There are even photographs in the exhibition that show us the actual
places she painted.
As do many
artists, O’Keeffe often made several versions of the same subject (Cezanne
especially comes to mind). In Purple
Hills (1935), a monumental mountainous form, like a draped, slumbering body
on its side, seems to melt into the earth. Hanging immediately to its right is Red Hill Series II (1935/38), where
again we see these sinuous, intersecting lumps. All that is solid melts into
air… only to be precisely captured by Herbert Lotz’s photograph, Red Hills Series II (2003), where all
sorts of rivulets have repeatedly slithered downward and carved into the sloping
sides of the adobe-pink hills, gradually wearing down and smoothing away the
rough edges.
Still’s
paintings, on the other hand, are pure abstractions. Just paint on the surface
of canvas, nothing more. When a viewer does come in to take a look, you can
hear comments like, “Geez, my five-year-old can do that,” or “It looks like the
work of a bad house painter,” or “I don’t get it, what’s he trying to say?”
The strange
thing is that Still and O’Keeffe have more in common than most people think.
Without the sky, or some other fairly specific reference, O’Keeffe’s paintings
are indeed abstractions, just paint on a surface — which is really what
painting is anyway. O’Keeffe’s work is about the arrangement of surfaces,
shapes, colors, and textures on canvas. So is Still’s.
It may be that
in the world of television we have forgotten how to look at things. If we stop
and actually look at the Still
paintings then ask ourselves some questions, we just might get somewhere with
his work. We need to ask better questions than “what’s the artist trying to
say?” Instead, we should consider how the artist went about making such
paintings.
For example, 1949-H measures approximately 7 by 6
feet. It consists mostly of red paint. From within the surface, almost as if
some of the red has been peeled away, we can see some brown. Near the top right
corner, some white emerges. Amidst all that red, an incredibly vibrant blue
splotch with just a dab of yellow peeks out from a spot near the lower right
edge. Over on the left is more bright yellow, but this yellow isn’t a dab but
an ever-so-subtle gestural line along the edge of the canvas. There is a dab of
white at the bottom edge and another one just a few feet away. The more one
looks, the more one sees.
All around you
is order and balance. As you go from canvas to canvas, you begin to realize
that no mark, no splotch is entirely accidental. Are they just incredibly great
accidents? The question definitely crosses your mind. But who cares if they’re
accidents? They’re beautiful.
The
more you think about how to make these marks, the more you realize that you
can’t really figure it out. These are complex compositions: think music without
sound. We usually have no problem with the concept of abstraction in music.
This, of course, was not lost on Still, who said his “work in its entirety is
like a symphony in which each painting had its part.”
And
if you’re motivated to investigate further, you’ll find out that Still
sometimes painted some paintings more than once. 1957-D No. 1, an oil painting 9 feet high and 13 feet wide,
consists of large areas of jagged blacks and yellows with a little red here and
there. 1957-D No.2 (not a part of the
Albright-Knox collection) is almost identical — the difference being that
white has replaced the yellow. Everything else is almost exactly the same.
If we could see
these two side by side, it would not be much different than seeing one of
O’Keeffe’s paintings next to its site-specific photograph. Still painted the
landscape that was in his mind, and then he turned around and did it again.
It’s uncanny how spontaneity can be reproduced and controlled.
In
the end, it’s nice enough to enjoy a good picture, but once in a while it’s
even better to see a great painting.
Clyfford Still: Paintings
from the Collection,
through April 10 and, Georgia O’Keeffe and New Mexico: A Sense of
Place,through May 8, at the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Avenue, Buffalo. 716-882-8700 or
www.albrightknox.org. Hours: Wednesday to Thursday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday 10
a.m. to 10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. $10 for adults, $8 for
students and seniors, free admission every Friday from 3 p.m. to 10 p.m.
This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2005.
