An artist of Old Testament passions, far more alien to the current mindset than his contemporaries among the Abstract Expressionists, Clyfford Still seems an impossibly remote figure. Considering his achievements requires us to confront a spectacle of seriousness verging on outright pretension at a time when seriousness itself is not taken very seriously. This is not to say that we live in a world of zero gravity; ambivalent though we may be, we have our moments of seriousness. Our difficulty in looking at Still’s work is that the terms under which he labored have changed and the world along with it. Political, encyclopedic, cosmopolitan, pragmatic, ironic, allusive: our governing sensibility, whether we like it or not, is the inverse of Still’s. In his day, Still deliberately cut an “untimely” figure (Nietzsche, who extolled the unzeitgemäss, was one of Still’s favorite writers). Like Ezra Pound— the Idaho-born mo ...

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