An artist of Old Testament passions, far more alien to the current
mindset than his contemporaries among the Abstract
Expressionists, Clyfford Still seems an impossibly remote figure.
Considering his achievements requires us to confront a spectacle
of seriousness verging on outright pretension at a time when
seriousness itself is not taken very seriously. This is not to
say that we live in a world of zero gravity; ambivalent though we
may be, we have our moments of seriousness. Our difficulty in
looking at Still’s work is that the terms under which he labored
have changed and the world along with it. Political,
encyclopedic, cosmopolitan, pragmatic, ironic, allusive:
our governing sensibility,
whether we like it or not,
is the inverse
of Still’s.
In his day, Still deliberately cut
an “untimely” figure (Nietzsche, who extolled the
unzeitgemäss,
was one of Still’s favorite writers).
Like Ezra Pound—
the
Idaho-born modernist poet whom Still resembled in his crankiness, his
peripatetic life, and his peculiarly American blend of
academicism and autodidacticism—he was out of
step with his time, even if his fierce solemnity of purpose was
not.

“I’m not interested in illustrating my time,” announced Still in
1976. “A man’s ‘time’ limits him, it does not truly liberate
him.” Walking through the Hirshhorn Museum’s illuminating
exhibition of thirty-nine paintings from 1944 through
1960—
“when,” writes James T. Demetrion, the museum’s director,
“the artist’s creativity burst forth and flowered”—I couldn’t
help wondering how such a stern, single-minded presence would be
received today, in