Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still is America's most important, most significant, and most daring artist. This painter, pursuing a course independent of the conventional apparatus of art dealers and galleries, almost never exhibits except under museum auspices. For these reasons a Clyfford Still exhibition is a major event in the art world, and a book on Clyfford Still is a major event in the world of publishing. The present volume, which records the 1979-80 exhibition of seventy-nine Still paintings, dating from 1942 to 1978, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art--the largest exhibition of his work ever held--is the most comprehensive book on Still's work and thus an important document of twentieth-century art. Although Still has always kept aloof from the stereotyping nomenclature of schools and movements, he has had a powerful impact on contemporary art. His monumental canvases--bold forms saturated with intense color--are of surpassing scale and power. It is easy to understand why Still prefers the extended coverage that is generally possible in a museum environment: his works are charged with a sustaining energy that relates them to one another over the almost forty years that their creation spans, and when viewed seriatim they convey a transcendent narrative quality. Each of the seventy-nine paintings in the Metropolitan Museum's exhibition is reproduced here as a full-page or fold-out color-plate and is fully documented. Many other major works by Still are illustrated in black and white. Notes by the artist, selected letters from his files, and a biographical outline are accompanied by documentary photographs. The book contains a preface by Philippe de Montebello, director of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and an enlightening introduction by the eminent art critic Katharine Kuh.