CLYFFORD STILL (1904-1980)
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Provenance
Marlborough Gallery, sold during the artist's lifetimeChristie's New York: Wednesday, May 11, 2005, Lot 28
Private Collection
Exhibition
New York, Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Clyfford Still, October-November 1969Polanco, Centro Cultural Arte Contemporaneo, Fundación Cultural Televisa, Pintura estadounidense, Expresionismo Abstracto, October 1996-January 1997
Washington, D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960, June-September 2001
Munich, Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung, Monet and ...More...Modernism, November 2001-March 2002
Literature
Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, Clyfford Still, New York, 1969, p. 62-63, no. 32 (illustrated in color)Fundación Cultural Televisa, Pintura estadounidense, Expresionismo Abstracto, Mexico, 1996, no. 106, p. 106-107 (illustrated)
James Demetrion and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Clyfford Still: Paintings, 1944-1960, Washington, DC, 2001, no. 38 (illustrated in color)
Karin Sagner, Gottfried Boehm, and John William Gabriel, Monet and Modernism, Munich, 2001, p. 292-293 (illustrated in color)
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IMPORTANT FACTS
PH-589 marks a transition in Still’s career, where his already profound engagement with abstraction began to evolve toward greater spareness and a deeper exploration of the expressive potential of voids and open space.
PH-589 is an anticipatory event before his move to rural Maryland in 1961 that coincided with a period of introspection and formal refinement when Still began to strip his compositions down to their essential elements.
This painting signals the burgeoning openness of Still’s later works, where the interplay of painted forms and unpainted ground would become a defining characteristic.
The chance to acquire a work by Still is incredibly rare; only 59 of his total 1,107 paintings are in private collections. The vast majority are in museums.
The Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, Colorado holds 95% of the artist’s oeuvre, or 3,125 pieces (approximately 830 paintings and more than 2,300 works on paper and sculpture).
There are only 69 auction records total for Clyfford Still (62 of which are paintings). Since 2020, Still’s paintings have come to auction only 7 times. There has never been a Still painting this large to come to auction.
HISTORY
Clyfford Still occupies a monumental position in the history of modern art, often heralded as the earliest pure abstract painter to work on an expansive scale. By the early 1940s, Still had already arrived at a radically abstract visual language that transcended the aesthetic frameworks of his peers, rejecting representational imagery and producing canvases that were immense in size and conceptual ambition. Pollock famously confessed that “Still makes the rest of us look academic,” and Rothko once kept a Still painting in his bedroom as a guiding inspiration. His work was, as critic Clement Greenberg remarked, “estranging and upsetting” in its genuine originality, a raw and elemental confrontation of form and color that defied conventional expectations.
For viewers familiar with Still’s oeuvre, his paintings typically evoke a powerful physicality: vast canvases covered in richly textured layers of pigment—earthy blacks, ochres, siennas, and cadmiums—applied with a trowel-like rigor that recalls weathered geological formations. These thickly encrusted surfaces often alternate with more thinly painted passages, all juxtaposed against large swaths of bare canvas that lend his compositions a sense of immense scale and open-ended possibility. This aesthetic, rooted in the grandeur of raw and elemental presence, often manifests as jagged, opaque forms whose stark contrasts convey a primal energy.
PH-589, on the other hand, marks a transition in Still’s career, where his already profound engagement with abstraction began to evolve toward greater spareness and a deeper exploration of the expressive potential of voids and open space. Painted in 1959, the expected density of his earlier surfaces gives way to a lighter touch and a more restrained use of paint. Against largely unpainted ground, two jagged shapes of continental significance hang suspended, their edges torn and irregular, as if wrested from the canvas itself. The bare canvas, which had served as a compositional counterpoint in Still’s earlier works, now asserts itself as a dominant feature, heightening the power of the painted forms while introducing an ethereal sense of light and space.
This shift was both aesthetic and philosophical. By the late 1950s, Still had grown increasingly disenchanted with the art world, distancing himself from its commercial and critical structures. PH-589 is an anticipatory event before his move to rural Maryland in 1961 that coincided with a period of introspection and formal refinement when Still began to strip his compositions down to their essential elements. As Still explained, he sought to fuse color, texture, and form into “a living spirit,” transcending their materiality to evoke the human capacity for transcendence.
This painting signals the burgeoning openness of Still’s later works, where the interplay of painted forms and unpainted ground would become a defining characteristic. By the 1960s and 1970s, Still’s palette grew lighter, his gestures sparser, and his use of emptiness more deliberate, creating compositions that were at once monumental and ephemeral. Yet the seeds of that evolution are already present here in the restrained yet powerful interplay of color and space. His revolutionary approach to abstraction—both in scale and in spirit—provided a foundation upon which the Abstract Expressionists built their legacy. At the same time, his work resists easy interpretation, demanding instead an unmediated confrontation with its raw, elemental presence. With its terse eloquence and rhythmic vitality, this painting is both a culmination of Still’s early achievements and a momentous portent of his later innovations.
A decade after Still created PH-589, it was exhibited at the Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York, in the momentous show Clyfford Still (November 25, 1969 through January 3, 1970). It was the first time since 1952 that Still had shown his work publicly in New York. The exhibition featured a selection of paintings and works on paper from a larger group of artworks purchased by the gallery. In 1970, Artforum published art critic Patrick McCaughey’s extensive and insightful review of the exhibition, which traced Still’s relationship to the “Gothic idea” through the decades of paintings on display.
TOP RESULTS AT AUCTION

"1949-A-No. 1" (1949) sold for $61,682,500 USD.

"1947-Y-No. 2" (1947) sold for $31,442,500 USD.

"PH-125" (1948) sold for $30,712,500 USD.

"PH-144" (1919) sold for $28,739,000 USD.
SIMILAR PAINTINGS IN MUSEUM COLLECTIONS
Clyfford Still Museum Denver, Colorado
Buffalo AKG Art Museum Buffalo, New York
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Metropolitan Museum of Art New York
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