Art: THE IMAGE AND THE VOID

FOR the art neophyte in search of a style after World War II, the place to be was San Francisco. The California School of Fine Arts, which in the 1930s had brought Diego Rivera to San Francisco, had suddenly burst into life again, this time around two fiery abstract painters, Russian-born Mark Rothko, who was scrubbing canvases with shimmering bands of color, and North Dakota-born Clyfford Still, whose outsize paintings suggested both Western canyons and bark peeled from a tree. Talented younger men (notably Sam Francis and Lawrence Calcagno) spread the Rothko-Still gospel in staccato dab-and-dash across the U.S. and on to Paris and Rome.

Split Coming. Almost as suddenly as it arose, the San Francisco Renaissance split. Still and Rothko departed for the East Coast. Dean of those who remained was Boston-born David Park, and in 1951 he abruptly turned his back on abstract expressionism and won an award in the San Francisco Annual for a painting, Boys on Bicycles, in which the boys were boys, and the wheels were round. “As you grow older,” Park said, “it dawns on you that you are yourself—that your job is not to force yourself into a style, but to do what you want.” The result was to sire a new and on the whole gentler generation of San Francisco figure painters, most conspicuous of whom is Richard Diebenkorn (TIME color, March 17, 1958). Park, 48, who sold 14 canvases at prices from $500 to $2,000 in a one-man show at Manhattan’s Staempfli Gallery last month, still keeps the thick colors, fat brush strokes and overall concern with surface that marks the abstract expressionists, but he frankly welcomes figures back into art. “Before,” he confesses, “I felt like a critic while I was painting, not a painter. Besides, I like bodies.”

Beware of Death. But Clyfford Still, 54, pushed on into abstraction with never a backward look. He treats art as an apocalyptic vision, refuses to let visitors (even buyers) inside his door, recently turned down the offer of a one-man show at Venice’s Biennale because of his professed fear that it would be misinterpreted as catering to “the praise of Vanity Fair.” “A painting in the wrong hands is a highly dangerous force,” Still hints darkly, “just like a mathematical equation.”

An unreconstructed individualist, Still pours odium and contempt on his contemporaries, scorns their “witless parodies” and “capering before an expanse of canvas.”

This week Still, who has not shown a single painting in seven years, is relenting in a big way, as Buffalo’s Albright Art Gallery opens its doors on a one-man show of 72 oils covering 21 years. Still set stiff terms: all pictures were to be hung by himself, all competing modern canvases were to be banished from sight.

Faced with this staggering array of canvases—many, like 1957-0 (see color), nearly 9½ ft. tall—museumgoers may boggle at Still’s “direct, immediate, and truly free vision,” that Still says he has achieved laboriously over the years. Its imagery brings to mind geysers, waterfalls, vast expanse of Western plains, hallucinatory voids, and sometimes just streaks of paint. But many critics rank him high among the top half-dozen U.S. painters—and so does Still. “Let no man undervalue the implications of this work or its power for life,” he warns, “or for death, if it is misused.”