A Family Affair

DAVID CATEFORIS
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Jackson Pollock, who made his landmark drip paintings by working
on the floor and attacking the canvas from every direction with
liquid paint to generate dynamic linear compositions such as
Lucifer (1947; pl. 19). The finished painting gives ample evidence
of Pollock’s process of creating it. He first applied swaths of cream
over grays to form a base layer over which he splashed patches of
aluminum gray; thinner skeins of black; spots of bright yellow,
orange, and blue; and finally several spidery throws of moss green.
The result is an airy, open web of surface lines through which the
viewer can peer and perceive, in T. J. Clark’s words, “the feeling
of far, essentially unobstructed distances presenting themselves
on the other side of the foreground veil.” 6 This sense of depth
behind or below the picture plane resonates with Pollock’s understanding
of his art as emerging from the unconscious, conceived
of as a psychic layer lying beneath the conscious mind—much like
Sam Richardson’s submerged iceberg. 7
Many of the flung paint lines in Pollock’s Lucifer extend to the
edges of the canvas and can be imagined to continue beyond them,
creating a sense of potentially limitless extension. Such a quality
is even more fundamental to Clyfford Still’s magisterial 1957-J No.
1 (PH-142) (1957; fig. 4, pl. 31), with its broad, jagged-edged planes
of dry color that seemingly rise from the base of the vast canvas
and climb to its crown. Still’s craggy, abutting expanses of rusty
red and dense black open up to reveal tan oases of raw canvas,
many encircling small islands of icy white paint. Scattered accents
of brighter hues—orange, yellow, and blue—serve as foils to the
overall starkness of the palette. Two small vertical slivers of dark
blue, one at center right and another at upper left, noticeably rest
atop the colors below them; they are the painting’s only prominent
instances of spatial overlap, throwing into relief the overall flatness
upon which Still insisted when he spoke of using “texture to kill a
color, color to kill space.” 8 The deeply philosophical artist likely
understood this frank declaration of the painted surface in ethical
terms, describing his art as “an instrument of thought which would
aid in cutting through all cultural opiates, past and present, so that
a direct, immediate, and truly free vision could be achieved, and
an idea be revealed with clarity.” 9
Compared to the clarity that Still sought in paintings such as
1957-J No. 1, Mark Rothko’s stately composition in the Anderson
Collection from the same year, with its stacked, soft-edged rectangles
of white and orange-red set against a dusky pink ground,
courts ambiguity (pl. 32). Whereas Still laid on thick pigment with
a palette knife, Rothko applied thin paint with brushes, sponges,
and rags to achieve a flat and impalpable surface as well as to
generate subtly complex spatial dynamics, as the blurred rectangles
seem by turns to hover, to radiate forward, and to sink mysteriously
into atmospheric depths, inviting an emotional response from the
viewer. This was indeed what Rothko sought; he understood his
art not in strictly formal terms but as “dealing with human emotion:
with the human drama as much as I can possibly experience it.” 10
Rothko’s use of thin paint that bled into the canvas rather than
resting on its surface, combined with the example of Pollock’s drip
Figure 4 (PLATE 31)
CLYFFORD STILL
1957-J No. 1 (PH-142), 1957 (detail)
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