Clyfford Still. (American, 1904-1980). 1944-N No. 2. 1944. Oil on unprimed canvas, 8' 8 1/4" x 7' 3 1/4" (264.5 x 221.4 cm). The Sidney and Harriet Janis Collection
Four thoughts I had on Clyfford Still’s painting 1944-N No.2 at MoMA (not me in the picture to the right):
- The painting as a detail view of a diseased animal’s skin – its black hide tearing open from a swelling infection beneath.
- A painting that masks its medium. Scraped-down impasto technique gives the painting’s surface a distinctively un-painted look. Graphite paste or oil paint? This ambiguity compounded by the velvety, rough tactility of the picture in opposition to paint’s slick liquidity.
- The painting as a birds-eye-view of fires skirmishing on blackened ground, a bleak expanse of a traumatic horrorscape. Lava clawing at charred terrain.
- The painting as a window onto some great chaotic undoing behind a veneer of order. That tear stretching from the upper left corner to the bottom right is interrupted by the white gallery wall. The rip seems safely contained by the organizing space around the picture. But the brutality of the tear seems irrepressible so one must imagine that the gash continues behind the wall, wrapping around the edge of the painting and extending into the dark unknown of the museum architecture, and out and down into the earth, and through into space, this schism reaching out into infinity pulling our seemingly unified world apart into two. And behind it? That reddish glow. Of something better? Or something worse.
