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Untitled

Large abstract painting, overlapping zigzagging layers of orange, cream, red, and black.
© 2018 City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

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  • Large abstract painting, overlapping zigzagging layers of orange, cream, red, and black.

Date:

1958

Artist:

Clyfford Still
American, 1904-1980

About this artwork

In the late 1940s Clyfford Still, along with Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko, originated the type of Abstract Expressionism known as color-field painting, a term used to describe very large canvases dominated by monumental expanses of intense, homogeneous color. Like most of Still’s mature work, Untitled is a sheer wall of paint, imposing and self-sustaining, that makes no concessions to conventional notions of beauty or pictorial illusionism. This painting’s textural effects give it an insistent, complex materiality. Dominated by blacks applied with both a trowel and brushes, the surface is by turns reflective and chalky, granular and smooth, feathery and leaden. These variegated black surfaces are even more emphatic because their continuity is broken by areas of blank canvas and white paint. Like veins in igneous rock, streaks of orange, yellow, and green paint are embedded in the black voids. Mediating between the light and dark masses are areas of crimson, heightened at the edges, as if inflamed, by bright orange.

Status

On View, Gallery 398

Department

Contemporary Art

Artist

Clyfford Still

Title

Untitled

Place

United States (Artist's nationality:)

Date  Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.

1958

Medium

Oil on canvas

Dimensions

290.2 × 406.4 cm (114 1/4 × 160 in.)

Credit Line

Mr. and Mrs. Frank G. Logan Purchase Prize Fund; Roy J. and Frances R. Friedman Endowment; through prior gift of Mrs. Henry C. Woods; gift of Lannan Foundation

Reference Number

1997.164

Copyright

© 2018 City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Extended information about this artwork

Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.

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