Still Waters Run Deep
At Hirshhorn, a Long-Overdue Exhibition
By Blake Gopnik
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, June 24, 2001

Abstract art is like Tabasco sauce.

This is not just a metaphor; it is a close analogy.

Hot peppers, I am told, provide a sensory experience that changes the sense organ that perceives it. Eat them right from childhood, and they provide a different taste experience to you than to someone who's new to them. It's not, I gather, simply that you've become more used to how they burn your tongue and so take pleasure in the sensation. It's that you really feel less of their sting than other people do, or that you may even sense it as a pleasant pungency.

Ditto abstraction -- as demonstrated, in all sorts of interesting and complex ways, by the major show of pioneer American abstractionist Clyfford Still that opened Thursday at the Hirshhorn Museum. And as confirmed by my own childhood experience.

For Still, who was born in 1904 into a modest family of Western homesteaders, liking art at all, let alone making it, was quite a stretch. Moving on from that to pure abstraction took a good few decades, some trips to New York from his California home, and a lot of courage. That may be why he sometimes seemed to attach more earth-shaking significance to his new form than it could always bear. He insisted that the profoundly pretty pictures that he came to make must also contain a "power for life -- or for death." His genuinely cataclysmic artistic shift from figuration to abstraction had to somehow get mirrored in the metaphysics of his pictures, too -- whether they could carry that much freight or not. The novelty of Still's own abstraction got him overheated, you could say. But then, he wasn't exactly raised on it.

I, on the other hand, had the strange fortune to grow up in a middle-class household all done up in radical abstraction. One favorite object in the living room -- our equivalent to the corner hutch -- consisted of a pair of seamless boxes about four feet high and wide by one foot deep, immaculately finished by California artist John McCracken in an uninflected yellow lacquer; stacked up two high, they took the shape of a kind of giant cornflakes box with a join around the middle. I remember the simple joy I felt, still feel, around this sculpture -- its obvious good sense as true fine art, for someone who had never known another kind. But I also remember the absolute, angry perplexity it caused to every friend I ever showed it to. Like many other art world tyros, they felt that they'd been burned by abstract art: Because it meant nothing to them, they imagined that it was a con that couldn't mean at all.

Weirdly, this was something that my friends seemed to share with even those who first dreamed up the stuff, and who nevertheless had the hardest of hard times coming to grips with it. Even abstraction's first creators saw it as massively complex and challenging, desperately in need of the most arcane, even metaphysical, elucidation. As too hot to taste, without some strong encouragement in words.

Still was one of a small group of American pioneers who, in the years just after World War II, established abstraction as Modernism's dominant late mode. But Still couldn't just sit back and enjoy the palpable, complex glories of the visual spectacle that he helped create. Like almost all his abstract expressionist friends and peers and rivals -- Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman played all three roles at one time or another -- Still insisted that there was "more to it" than that. "I made it clear," said the pathologically immodest artist, "that a single stroke of paint, backed by work and a mind that understood its potency and implications, could restore to man the freedom lost in twenty centuries of apology and devices for subjugation." Whatever that means -- and it's typical of Still in his best Old Testament prophet manner -- it sounds at least as though it must be grander, more important than painting a profoundly gorgeous picture. But I'm convinced that the real depths to be found right on the surface of Still's greatest canvases matter more than the pseudo-profundities hooked onto them by nervous artists and critics.

(Recently, a famous art historian admitted that "even many of the people who enjoy looking at [abstraction] do not profess to understand it very well. Indeed, much abstract painting seems almost to defy the very notion of being understood." He must have been raised on Norman Rockwell.)

Before Still put it to the test, who could ever have guessed that the simple color blue could get as deep, could fill the eye as full, as it does in his "1950-M No. 1"? A huge canvas, the height and width of your average bedroom wall, is almost completely covered with two tones of paint: a classic royal blue, and a barely lighter shade that's something like the color of a summer sky just before the sun begins to set. But rather than dividing the pictorial labor fairly, into an abstract figure and the ground it sits on, the two colors jockey for position right across the surface of the painting. It's as though two rival painters have been given buckets full of paint, and told to cover the whole canvas: As fast as one puts down one shade, the other splats the second tone on top of it. And then, in case we were to think that this was a pictorial one-liner about the worthiness of blue, Still throws in some other elements that nail the whole thing down just right. A dollop of yellow along one edge, barely bigger than a Tweety Bird, insists that size isn't all that counts, and deflates the bombast of all that sober blue. Toward the middle of the canvas, a passing fleck of red demands an entirely different kind of up-close looking than its monochrome setting, and so prevents a lazy viewer from settling back to wallow in the rippling waters that float around it.

Other similarly gorgeous pictures, built around fields of black, or yellow, or red, are the gems of the Hirshhorn show. They are as direct, as bold, as deep an exploration of unadulterated beauty as anything that you could come across. They take the kinds of abstract-art decisions we all make every day -- Should I wear the striped shirt, or the solid? Should I buy the sofa that looks as though it's laser-cut, or the one that's like a melted bar of soap? -- and distill them to such purity that they become high art. Which is just the kind of praise that Still himself would have abhorred.

"I categorically reject the modes and premises which would debase the concepts generated in these works into aesthetic values," he said. "My work is simply not understood by those who would equate it with a beige settee." But then, Still didn't grow up with abstract art, and so could hardly bear the thought that anyone could find so much refreshment in the pepper pot he thought he had created. He wanted his art to read like Nietzsche's rants -- "I choose that my art be engaged in that which exalts the spirit of man," he said -- whereas I find in it the nuanced domestic pleasures of Jane Austen. Which, incidentally, also exalt the spirit of mankind, without feeling the need to proclaim the fact.

Like Pollock and several other heroes of abstract art, Still was a demon of a man. But it's a mistake to read the makers' manners into their works, as myths and movies have always wanted us to do. Many of AbEx's best abstractions yield expression that in fact is subtly modulated, even high-spirited, and all at odds with the aggressive angst that brought them into being. What's going on in all of this, I think, is that abstraction demanded an intemperate, ferocious commitment on the part of anyone who dared to make the stuff and call it art, regardless of the real emotional tenor of the work that the artist produced. In the 1940s, abstraction of any kind, right down to pink polka dots dancing on baby blue, was still bad stuff, and only someone with a good dose of attitude was likely to have the guts to carry it off.

You had to have strong nerves to make a picture whose profundity was in its gorgeousness, when most great art was talked about as though it had the kind of meaning that you'd find in a philosophy text. Still had the courage to force his new work onto a hateful art world that resisted it: AbEx, he wrote to Barnett Newman, would "leave a mark across its scaly back that will be felt for some time, I can only hope." Where his courage failed him was in finding equally new ways to talk and think about the art he made.

Though it must be said that Still's pictures sometimes have a note of the conservative in them, despite the rhetoric of revolution that he favored. The monochromes I've raved about already are put together as no other picture ever had been. But many other paintings that are more typical of Still's approach are really just abstracted versions of traditional pictures, rather than a true breaking away from them.

Most of Still's trademark abstractions consist of a background of one color, with variously colored forms plopped down on top of it. Minus subject matter, that's not a bad description of your average picture painted from the Renaissance on down. Where most of Still's friends and enemies among the so-called New York School struggled to hammer out pictures that somehow cohere into a radically novel formal whole -- Pollock splashed his paint from edge to edge; Newman kept it to tight stripes -- Still's pictures can seem to lack that kind of new internal logic. When painting at his worst, Still simply follows the old rules of composition, with blobs instead of people as his subjects. It's hard to put it into words, but sometimes you wonder if there's any special reason why a Still should look the way it does: Without traditional space and narrative to tie his figures down onto his ground, or any altogether brand-new kind of composition that could do that work, there seems to be no reason for a blob to float in one place rather than another.

Still's heavily impastoed brushwork can seem equally unjustified. Traditionally, impasto had a function in describing form and volume. Get rid of those, and thick paint can seem an arbitrary way to color in a shape. There may be madness in Still's frothing oils, in good AbEx form, but there's not the method to it that his colleagues often found.

Insiders often say that Still has been neglected by posterity. Why not a movie about him, in all his ranting greatness, if a dull old soul like Pollock gets to have one? To some extent, Still brought neglect upon himself, giving great clumps of his paintings to smallish institutions in San Francisco and Buffalo, and then forbidding them to travel or be seen alongside other artists' works. (The show at the Hirshhorn features 39 classic pictures that somehow escaped from Still's demanding grip during his lifetime. Experts estimate that as much as 90 percent of Still's production remains unseen in his estate, pending the founding of the one-man, bookstoreless and cafe-free museum that his executors are aiming for.) But there may be another reason for his perennial status as an also-ran.

Still was a crucial pioneer in his burning support for abstraction, and in many of the genre's devices. (He claimed to have invented many of the trademark gestures that other abstract expressionists then made their own.) After all these years, however, not too many of the abstractions he turned out have all the spice that the best works of his peers have gotten us used to.