17 Facts About Clyfford Still

Clyfford Still was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately following World War II.

Clyfford Still was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and spent his childhood in Spokane, Washington and Bow Island in southern Alberta, Canada.

Clyfford Still attended Spokane University from 1926 to 1927 and returned in 1931 with a fellowship, graduating in 1933.

Clyfford Still spent the summers of 1934 and 1935 at the Trask Foundation in Saratoga Springs, New York.

In 1937, along with Washington State colleague Worth Griffin, Clyfford Still co-founded the Nespelem Art Colony that produced hundreds of portraits and landscapes depicting Colville Indian Reservation Native American life over the course of four summers.

In 1941 Clyfford Still relocated to the San Francisco Bay area where he worked in various war industries while pursuing painting.

Clyfford Still had his first solo exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art in 1943.

Clyfford Still taught at the Richmond Professional Institute, now Virginia Commonwealth University, from 1943 to 1945, then went to New York City.

Mark Rothko, whom Clyfford Still had met in California in 1943, introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who gave him a solo exhibition at her gallery, The Art of This Century Gallery, in early 1946.

Clyfford Still returned to San Francisco, where he became a highly influential professor at the California School of Fine Arts, teaching there from 1946 to 1950.

Clyfford Still encouraged some of his students to open a gallery called Metart, which was short-lived but influential.

Clyfford Still used a barn on the property as a studio during the warm weather months.

In 1957, Clyfford Still married Patricia Alice Garske, who had been one of his students at Washington State and was sixteen years his junior.

Unlike Mark Rothko or Barnett Newman, who organized their colors in a relatively simple way, Clyfford Still's arrangements are less regular.

Later solo exhibitions of Clyfford Still's paintings were presented by the Institute of Contemporary Art of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia in 1963 and at the Marlborough-Gerson gallery, New York, in 1969 to 1970.

Clyfford Still received the Award of Merit for Painting in 1972 from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, of which he became a member in 1978, and the Skowhegan Medal for Painting in 1975.

In March 2011, a Maryland court with jurisdiction over Patricia Clyfford Still's estate ruled that four of Clyfford Still's works could be sold before they officially became part of the museum's collection.