Grandiose, imperious, and irascible, Clyfford Still (1904–80) walked away from the commercial art world in 1951. By that point, his work had been featured in successful shows at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery (1946) and at the Betty Parsons Gallery (1947, 1950, and 1951). He had been a part of MOMA’s influential 1952 exhibition “Fifteen Americans.” Clement Greenberg called him “a highly influential maverick [and] an independent genius.” Jackson Pollock said, “He makes the rest of us look academic.” Acknowledged by Mark Rothko as a “myth-maker,” Still had succeeded with Pollock, Barnett Newman, Rothko, and William Baziotes, among others, in proving that America, rather than Europe, was at the forefront of modernism.
But his success smacked of bourgeois ambition and decadent profit-making, and Still would have none of either. So he left behind the galleries and museums—“comfort stations” and “supermarkets” he once sniffed—and bought a farm in rural Maryland. In the summer, he painted massive canvases almost nonstop in the farm’s barn-turned-studio. When he finished, he rolled the canvases up on a huge cardboard tube or metal drainpipe, separating the layers with foil. In the winter, he moved to his house in town and worked on drawings. If he ran out of paper, he drove to the local Woolworth’s to buy construction paper.
His intense periods of creativity were punctuated by rare solo exhibitions at the Albright Art