Clyfford Still on the Margins of Anarchy

Among the founding artists of the American Abstract Expressionist movement, Clyfford Still's pronounced individualism and hostility to State power are routinely acknowledged, but have yet to be critically evaluated in dialog with anarchist currents during and after World War II (fig. 1). David Anfam, who is the foremost authority on Still, has provided a baseline for charting interrelationships by perceptively analyzing how the artist's "Nietzschean brand of individualistic anarchism" shaped his self-conception and aesthetic romanticism, but goes no further.¹ More generally, scholarly treatments of Still's art and politics have foregrounded the Cold War as the key issue, to the detriment of anarchism. Susan Landauer, for example, influentially characterized the artist as a reactionary right-winger during the 1990s (more recently acknowledging Still's politics were not right wing, she supports her case with a passing reference to anarchist poet Kenneth Rexroth's "later" [1959] critique of the "social lie" by way of comparison).² Similarly, in Abstract Expressionism as Cultural Critique: Dissent during the McCarthy Period (1999), David Craven marshaled Anfam's analysis only to conclude Still's anarchism drew him into an "unwitting convergence with [Cold War] laissez-faire individualism."³ Turning to Ellen D. Landau's codifying anthology, Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique (2005), Still is again subsumed into Abstract Expressionism's Cold War reception, with Marxist interpretations of the movement's aesthetics and social significance predominating.⁴ Katy Siegel, Lillian Davies, and Pauline Pobocha's exhaustive survey, Abstract Expressionism (2011) is similarly silent regarding anarchism as a factor in Still's development.⁵ The pattern is indicative of how Abstract Expressionism is broadly framed in the discourse: as a breakthrough "American" style pioneered by leftist-inclined artists in response to World War II and buffeted, initially, by the politics of the Cold War, which was quickly taken up by the art market, canonized as the latest advance in international modernism ("a new art for a new world"), and integrated into museum collections in the United States and Europe.⁶

Fig 1.

Erna Bert Nelson, Studio Portrait of Clyfford Still, 1941. Photograph courtesy of the Clyfford Still Archive, Clyfford Still Museum, Denver, Colorado.

Until very recently Still's archive and personal library were unavailable to researchers, and this undoubtedly also played its part in the interpretative lacuna I am drawing attention to. Letters and other documents in the Clyfford Still Museum archive allow an examination of transatlantic anarchism's concern with aesthetic values, art's capacity to serve as a site of social freedom, and the institutional forces arraigned against the movement. Both Still's art practice and views, and his reception in this milieu, matter for understanding Still's contributions to the politicization of art. Anarchists engaged in cultural networking through "horizontal ties among diverse, autonomous elements" (for example, social centers, editorial groups, activist organizations, and informal friendship circles) coalescing around opposition to authoritarianism in all its forms.⁷ These fluid, affinity-charged networks generated diversity, which was regarded as a positive value, in accord with anarchism's overarching ambition to institute direct forms of democracy within a decentralized federated system of governance.⁸ Consequently, Still's aesthetic radicalism and combative stance toward art institutions found a willing audience among anarchists, even as he deliberately marginalized himself from broader social struggles.

The American Sickness

On November 25, 1957, anarchist poet/activist Michael McClure sent a letter to Still from San Francisco.⁹ He related, "I've admired your painting very much for a long time," adding, "I wish had gotten to the Bay area a few years sooner."¹⁰ McClure was recalling his decision to relocate to the city in 1951 to study with Still and fellow Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko (like Still, an anarchist).¹¹ San Francisco is where Still had begun working in an abstract idiom, creating paintings that "established him as one of the most original and highly regarded artists associated with the earliest strains of Abstract Expressionism" (Sobel, "Why a Clyfford Still Museum?," 15). He taught at San Francisco's California School of Fine...