Noir: Clyfford Still Seen By The Full Moon

Clyfford Still (1904-1980)
1957-D, No. 1 1957Oil on canvas, 113 x 159" inches
Albright-KnoxGift of Seymour H. Knox, 1959

Clyfford Still was something of a maverick in the art world. In many cases, he disdained or was infuriated by anyone who tried to interpret his work, including art critics, art historians, patrons, and museum curators. His attitude about art and art making was romantic and passionate, and he did not believe that most people understood or properly appreciated his work.
Born in North Dakota in 1904, Still spent time in California and New York before settling in Maryland to live and work. In so doing, he rejected the politics of the New York art scene, which for the first time in history had become the international center of the art world.

Still painted large abstract canvases with much impasto (thick, textural paint) and vertical, jagged bolts of colors. The flame-like patches of color are often cut off at the canvas edges, making viewers think that the forms continue beyond what they can see. Although his early work includes figurative paintings and landscapes, Still has denied that these have any connection or relevance to his mature, signature images. Instead, he has said, "Each painting is an episode in a personal history, an entry in a journal," and "My work in its entirety is like a symphony in which each painting has its part." The titles of his paintings, which contain dates, letters, and numbers that signify the order in which they were created, support this explanation.
Still wanted his paintings to be under his own personal control, and did not like them separated from one another or exhibited with other artists' work. He felt that his paintings could only be understood as part of a whole, with the whole being the evolution of his entire life's work. This obsession with maintaining absolute control resulted in his rejection of offers to buy his paintings, refusing awards and honors, and declining invitations to exhibit both in individual and group shows.

Woman Scratches, Rubs Butt Over $30M Painting

A Colorado woman dropped her pants at a museum and rubbed her rear end all over a painting valued at $30 million, according to police.

Carmen Tisch, 36, was arrested after scratching, punching and, well, rubbing her butt against Clyfford Still's "1957-J no.2" and causing an estimated $10,000 damage to the artwork at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Police believe she was drunk during the late December incident.

"You have to wonder where her friends were," a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office told the Denver Post.

Tisch was charged with felony criminal mischief on Wednesday and has been held on a $20,000 bond since the incident in late December, said Lynn Kimbrough, spokeswoman for the Denver District Attorney's Office.

The oil-on-canvas abstract expressionist painting was spared additional damage when the woman tried to urinate on it but apparently missed.