Clyfford Still: “The Vertical Necessity of Life”

Clyfford Still - Untitled - 1960 - Oil on canvas - 113 x 146 1/4in. (287 x 371.5cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (click photo for larger image)Artist Clyfford Still (1904-1980) was known to be  an extremely difficult man, who eschewed the New York art world, resisted most critiques of his work, and very tightly controlled the ways in which his art was marketed, sold, collected and exhibited.

His evolution to an abstract style in the 1940s predated and influenced similar trends in other of his Abstract Expressionist contemporaries. One of his primary goals was to address what he saw as the monumental conflicts between humankind and nature. Still believed that art could play a moral role in a disorienting modern world. Vast, vertical fields of color became a key means of expression for the artist, and he would eventually influence a second generation of Color Field painters. His work does call to mind many of the vibrant, enormous stained glass panels created during the Middle Ages.

"These are not paintings in the usual sense," he once said, "they are life and death merging in fearful union...they kindle a fire; through them I breathe again, hold a golden cord, find my own revelation." 

Adolph Gottlieb: Universal Symbols

Adolphe Gottlieb - Composition - 1955 - Oil on canvas - 6' 1/8" x 60 1/8" (183.3 x 152.5 cm) - MoMA, New York (click photo for larger image)Growing up during the Depression and maturing throughout the interwar period and the rise of Hitler, American Abstract Expressionist Adolph Gottlieb (1903-1974) “staunchly defended the art of the avant-garde for its ability to express authentic feeling in the face of the trauma of World War II.” (The Art Story) His work remains highly relevant today, since great evils and profound ignorance, as well as noble aspirations and achievements continue to be part of the human experience.

In the 1940s, Gottlieb began to emulate the art of early Native American and Middle Eastern cultures, explorations that eventually inspired what came to be known as his Pictograph paintings. Gottlieb developed his own system of symbols, designed to appeal to the unconscious mind. He felt that new imagery was needed to address the complex issues and psyches of his day. He found inspiration and “a sense of primeval spirituality” in the Native American art and the arts of other tribal cultures. His objective was always to work toward creating universal meanings—using simple forms. The work featured here is an example of that idea.

In the artist’s own words, ”Different times require different images. Today when our aspirations have been reduced to a desperate attempt to escape from evil, and times are out of joint, our obsessive, subterranean and pictographic images are the expression of the neurosis which is our reality. To my mind certain so-called abstraction is not abstraction at all. On the contrary, it is the realism of our time.”

Elizabeth Catlett: An Icon of Expressionism

Elizabeth Catlett - Woman Fixing Her Hair - 1993 - Magogany and opals - 27 x 18 x 13 in. (68.6 x 45.7 x 33 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York African-American born sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett (1915-2012) is best known for the sculptures and prints she produced during the 1960s and 1970s—which are seen as politically charged. Her works often focus on the female experience.

Born and raised in Washington, D.C., Catlett graduated from Howard University in 1935. She later received a master’s degree from the State University of Iowa.  During the 1940s, Catlett taught art at a number of schools and began to exhibit with other African American artists who would go on to equally illustrative careers, including Robert Blackburn, Jacob Lawrence, Hughie Lee-Smith, Norman Lewis, Archibald Motley, and Charles White. She became the “promotion director” for the George Washington Carver School in Harlem. In 1946, she received a Rosenwald Fun Fellowship that allowed her to travel to Mexico, where she studied wood carving and ceramic sculpture at the Escuela de Pintura y Esculture, in Esmeralda. She later moved to Mexico, married, and became a Mexican citizen.

Her work is a mixture of the abstract and the figurative, in the Modernist tradition, with clear influences from African and Mexican artistic traditions, as well. According to the Catlett, the main purpose of her work is to convey social messages rather than pure aesthetics. While not very well known to the general public, her work is heavily studied by art students looking to depict race, gender and class issues.

Woman Fixing Her Hair is a late sculpture that embodies the characteristics of her best work. Its subject, a nude woman caught in the act of her daily toiletry, is familiar and empathetic. Melding human form and furniture into a seamless whole, the artist navigates a line between abstraction and realism, cubism and biomorphism. Her exquisite handling of natural material-the smoothly polished mahogany and luminous opals-conveys the beauty that she sees in her subject matter.” (Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC)

Wayne Thiebaud: Nostalgia for the Commonplace

Wayne Thiebaud - Cut Meringues - 1961 - Oil on canvas - 16 x 20" (40.6 x 50.6 cm) - Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) New York (click photo for larger image)Wayne Thiebaud (b. 1920) is an American painter and printmaker who is perhaps best known for his thickly painted still-lifes of such items as foods and cosmetics. Although he is often associated with Pop Art—this designation isn’t wholly accurate. Unlike Pop artists, Thiebaud worked from life, not from media images. In addition, his renderings are characterized by loose, highly visible, brushstrokes, as opposed to the hard-edged, mechanical style of Pop Art. 

As a painter and a teacher, Thiebaud has always been interested in Realism, though his subject matter is not typically associated with that approach. By 1960, Thiebaud had developed a distinctive visual vocabulary centered on food. His work incorporates “familiar items that are often regarded, and sometimes disdained, as popular symbols of mass consumption in American society.” Unlike the works of many Pop artists, however, whose works sometimes suggest a condescension for the symbols of popular culture—Thiebaud insists that his subjects are born of nostalgia—not contempt. In addition, his oeuvre also includes landscapes and figurative art.

Floreine Stettheimer: An Idiosyncratic Style

Florine Stettheimer - The Cathedrals of Art - 1942 - Oil on canvas - 60 1/4 x 50 1/4 in. (153 x 127.6 cm) - Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY (click photo for larger image)American painter, designer, and poet Florine Stettheimer (1871–1944) developed a highly personal and idiosyncratic style that was characterized by vivid color, a purposeful naiveté, and whimsical humor—often in the service of wry social comment.

Stettheimer received training at New York’s Art Students League, where she studied from 1892 to 1895. In 1906 she moved to Europe with her mother and two sisters. While living abroad, she continued her studies in painting and was exposed to the work of the Symbolists and the Postimpressionists. With the outbreak of World War I in 1914, the family returned to New York City, where the Stettheimer women began hosting salons for Modernists. 

Stettheimer did receive some recognition during her lifetime. In 1932 her work was included in the First Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painters at the Whitney Museum. Her most ambitious work was a series of four canvases (one of which is featured here) in which she glorified and critiqued the cathedrals of the modern city: the financial district, the theatre, department stores, and the art museum. In this series, Stettheimer created extraordinary composite visions of New York’s economic, social, and cultural institutions. 

The Cathedrals of Art is a fantastical portrait of the New York art world. Microcosms of three of the city’s major museums and their collections are watched over by their directors: the Museum of Modern Art (upper left), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (center), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (upper right). A gathering of art critics, dealers, and photographers of the day, including Stettheimer herself (lower right), appears around the Metropolitan’s grand staircase. She was still working on The Cathedrals of Art when she died.