"1964-H (Indian Red and Black," by Clyfford Still, oil on canvas, 198.8 by 173.7 centimeters, 1946


The process of Still’s work was conceived in the same manner as that of his peers in terms of the adventurousness and the central part played by the artist’s active presence. Still himself would note later on in his career that the term “action painter” was misleading, especially when one considers the period of contemplation prior to the creation of gestural forms in his canvases—in short, accident played no part. Untitled, 1946 and other Stills from this period can be contrasted with the gestural paintings of his peers in that his work relates the discipline and control enacted on the forms of his canvases. His technique of pallet and knife creates a considerable buildup of paint on the surface and stresses the portrayal of the surface’s organic, yet heavily worked quality. Still is just as much “in the painting” as Pollock et al, albeit in a more tempered and premeditated way.
Indeed, evidence of Still’s cathartic presence in works such as Untitled, 1946 is apparent in his statements—
…I seem to achieve a comparable ecstasy in bringing forth the flaming life through these large responsive areas of canvas. And as the blues or reds or blacks leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry their power infinitely beyond the bounds of the limiting field, I move with them and find a resurrection from the moribund oppressions that held me only hours ago.

It is clear both after this statement and an examination of Untitled, 1946 that the work can be read as a biographical moment. Still creates a pictorial form which answers only to a subconscious guide. His work is not merely an extension on abstracting space in the cubist tradition; therefore, it cannot be said that Untitled, 1946 uses the novelty of abstracted space as an intermediary unto which Still’s handling of space relates meaning. Still’s generation of these forms is wholly tied to prompts of his cognitive being. The role of the canvas as an intermediary arena for dealing with three-dimensional space in two dimensional terms vanishes almost completely to the point at which the painting is more an extension of Clyfford Still than a representation of space.