SFMOMA, Part 30: Floor 2, 1900 to Now. PH-920 (Clyfford Still, 1974).
Nine and a half by fourteen feet of dark weather. PH-920 is a late Clyfford Still — painted in 1974 in Maryland, when he was seventy, six years before he died — and it refuses the late-style script. The standard story of late Still goes: the colors lighten, the bare canvas breathes, the touch softens. PH-920 doesn't. Dark murky purples and blacks, red and white and blue breaking through, jagged torn edges, tumultuous — a monumental late field with the old fire still in it. The standard story is wrong, or at least incomplete. At seventy, the uncompromising one was still uncompromising.
Clyfford Still, 1904 to 1980, got to abstraction first and then refused the victory. Motherwell: "Still had none" of the figurative residue the others carried. Pollock: "Still makes the rest of us look academic." Greenberg, 1955: "how estranging and upsetting genuine originality in art can be." First solo in 1943 — at the San Francisco Museum of Art, this museum, before the "Modern" was in the name. 1946, Art of This Century, via Rothko (they'd met in Berkeley in 1943). Betty Parsons, 1947 to 1951. Taught at the California School of Fine Arts — SFAI — 1946 to 1950, the most influential teaching years of his life; Diebenkorn was there, "influenced at first by Clyfford Still." The keeper, the line that explains a whole coast: "Diebenkorn learned from Clyfford Still that painting must not be pretty and from David Park that it should not be easy to make." Then the withdrawal: 1951, the letter to Betty Parsons — "It is simply that in this particular issue of exposing my work a network of associations and evaluations entirely at variance with the implications of my act in painting are brought to bear... I find these not only futile but disturbing in many ways." He cut Parsons and Guggenheim both. Declined all public exhibitions, 1952 to 1959. Refused sales, turned down shows, banned reproductions. The extreme episode, the one they still tell: he stormed into the collector Alfonso Ossorio's home and cut "its heart" out of a canvas Ossorio planned to loan overseas. The Maryland farm from 1961. He never stopped working — 372 paintings, 1,132 drawings in the Maryland years — while the art world wrote him off as absence.
The PH numbers are his own photographic inventory — "ph[otographic] record" — and the sequencing follows no chronological order, because he wanted no titles, no allusions: "I want no allusions to interfere with or assist the spectator." PH-920 is a number, not a name. The painting is the allusion.
The gift
In 1975 — the year this museum added "Modern" to its name — "convinced that this museum had an exceptional appreciation of his work, artist Clyfford Still made an extremely generous gift of 28 of his own paintings to SFMOMA." Twenty-eight paintings. PH-920 came straight from the studio: painted 1974, gifted 1975, one year later, from the seventy-year-old artist himself — not via dealer, not via estate. A living artist choosing SFMOMA for a barely-dry fourteen-foot canvas. The conditions were pure Still: the works must always be shown in their entirety, never intersperse other artworks, never be separated. The year of his Skowhegan Medal. The year before the 1976 SFMOMA show. The year before the Met retrospective of 1979 — "the largest survey afforded by this institution to the work of a living artist."
His 1978 will carried the logic to the end: the remaining works to "an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works" — none to be sold, given, or exchanged, retained "in perpetuity." His widow Patricia chose Denver in 2004; the Clyfford Still Museum opened in November 2011, some 2,400 works, ninety-five percent of his output. (A 2011 court ruling allowed four sales, $114 million, to endow it — the rare exception to the perpetuity clause.)
The late works
Denver's 2021 The Late Works: Clyfford Still in Maryland reframed the Maryland years as "distinct, complicated, and sometimes vulnerable" — household latex, rollers instead of palette knives, dime-store construction paper, unpainted canvas as "lightening agent," compositions that "topple" or "flutter," a palette broadening into bright yellows and purples. PH-920 is the counterexample inside the reframing: dark, aggressive, torn. The old vocabulary — the jagged verticals, the ruptured fields — at fourteen feet, at seventy. Robert Hughes, 1976: "A singular talent whose dimension will not be fully known in his own lifetime."
And the Bay Area claim, the reason it's on Floor 2 and not just in Denver: first solo ever at the San Francisco Museum of Art, 1943. Taught here in his most influential decade. The museum holds some thirty Stills, 1934 to 1974. The Floor 2 hang pairs the early maturity — PH-371 (1947-S), the breakthrough years — with this late reckoning. One line of contrast, and no more: the forties invented the language; 1974 proved he hadn't finished speaking it.
His own words, the cluster: "I never wanted color to be color. I never wanted texture to be texture, or images to become shapes. I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit." "It's intolerable to be stopped by a frame's edge." "I paint only myself, not nature."
So here's the thesis: PH-920 is the refutation of the gentle late style — fourteen feet of dark weather painted at seventy, gifted still wet to the museum that gave him his first solo. Still got to abstraction first, quit the galleries, banned the reproductions, cut the heart out of the loaned canvas, and kept painting in Maryland while the world looked away. The late-work story says soften, lighten, breathe. PH-920 says: the fire doesn't negotiate. "I never wanted color to be color... I wanted them all to fuse together into a living spirit." The spirit, at seventy, was still torn, still dark, still fourteen feet wide. The museum that got the 1975 gift — twenty-eight paintings, show them whole, never separate them — keeps it on Floor 2. 🌁
Timeline — Clyfford Still
1904 — born November 30, Grandin, North Dakota
1943 — first solo, San Francisco Museum of Art
1946–1950 — teaches, California School of Fine Arts
1951 — withdraws from commercial galleries (the Parsons letter)
1952–1959 — declines all public exhibitions
1961 — Maryland farm; the late decades begin
1974 — paints PH-920, age 70
1975 — gifts 28 paintings to SFMOMA, including PH-920
1979 — Met retrospective, largest living-artist survey to date
1980 — dies June 23, New Windsor, Maryland, age 75
2011 — Clyfford Still Museum opens, Denver