Clyfford Still: The Late Works

An exclusive look at the late work of one of the most influential and enigmatic painters, whose late-career paintings are virtually unknown to the public and many are published here for the first time. Clyfford Still (1904-1980) is a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, along with Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Willem de Kooning. This revelatory book, accompanying a groundbreaking exhibition, investigates Clyfford Still’s late work, both in painting and in drawing, made after his move to rural Maryland in 1961. This marks a particularly fertile period for Still, he made over 375 works on canvas and a staggering 1,100 works on paper in Maryland before his death in 1980 at the age of 75. Given Still’s especially reclusive posture later in life and the fact that none of the artworks in Still’s estate were exhibited or made available to anyone before the opening of the Clyfford Still Museum in 2011, a full-scale presentation of these forty paintings and thirty works on paper is especially meaningful. In addition to essays by Dean Sobel and David Anfam, the artists Alex Katz and Dorothea Rockburne contribute texts on the notion of “late work.”