🏛デンバー美術館のすぐそばにあるクリフォード・スティル美術館、事前に時間指定で予約して訪問。
🎨クリフォード・スティル（Clyfford Still）の作品
In 1966 Ethel Moore wrote in the biographical notes for the catalogue of an exhibition by Clyfford Still: "When he was 20 he made the first trip to New York, arriving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art before the doors opened. He was, however, disappointed in what he saw. He found something missing, some statement that he felt profoundly and did not find in the work of the pursue a more formal art education, he enrolled in a class at the Art Students League but found that disappointing also, and left after 45 minutes." Still remained in the city ― this was in 1924 ― for a few more weeks, in order to visit more museums and galleries, but the first impression seemed only to be confirmed. "Disillusioned, he shortened his stay in New York and returned West."
These few sentences sketch out the picture of the eccentric American artist in an almost idealising fashion. His "disillusionment" with and rejection of European art, which he saw as "decadent", the fact of of his being self-taught, his distancing himself from the big city ― New York ― and its "corrupt" art scene and finally his departure and return to the American West. In 1945, 20 years after his early disappointment, Still returned however to New York and was living there ― with interruptions ― during the period of the "triumph of American painting", as Irving Sandler put it. In the mid-1950s, while he refused to take part in exhibitions in New York, this gesture of withdrawal was rewarded by the public, who interpreted it as a sign of his particular artistic authenticity, and it certainly did nothing to diminish his renown. In 1961 Still finally retired to the rural isolation of Maryland.
During the final years of the war, Still had concerned himself, like many of his fellow artists, with myth-laden motifs, but in 1946-47 he developed his characteristic form of colour-field abstraction, with mostly vertically oriented forms and abrupt, irregular contours. The oil paint, applied to the canvas with a spatula, comes across as cracked and intentionally "uncultivated". Within the colour zones there is no shading, and between them there are no figure-to-ground relationships. Still's all-over compositions come across as details of a larger field of expanding beyond the borders of the picture, which in turn contributes to the unfinished appearance of the picture.
Interpreters of Still's pictures have seen in them time and again references to the wide-open landscape of North Dakota where he was brought up, or to the American West Coast, where he lived and taught in the late 1940s. This brings the aesthetic concept of the "sublime" into play, which was also central for other artists such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko: the confrontation of the subject with the idea of infinite size or infinite power in the face of an overwhelming experience (of nature). Still himself promoted this view of things, for example when he wrote in 1963: "The sublime? A paramount consideration in my studies and work from my elusive of capture or definition - only surely found least in the lives and works of those who babble of it the most." [Barbara Hess, "Modern Art"]
"Demands for communication are both presumptuous and irrelevant. The observer usually will see what his fears and hopes and learning teach him to see." ― Clyfford Still
0 件のコメント:
コメントを投稿