Clyfford Still Painting up for Auction $6,000,000

Lot Details
oil on canvas
114 1/4 x 164 in. (290.2 x 416.6 cm)
Painted in 1959, in the United States.

Source : https://www.phillips.com/detail/clyfford-still/241775

“You can turn the lights out. The paintings will carry their own fire.”
— Clyfford Still

Painted in 1959, Clyfford Still’s monumental PH-589 envelops the viewer in a vast field of unprimed canvas, across which a jagged flare of yellow at upper left and a ragged mass of orange along the lower edge unfold over nearly fourteen feet.

Executed in the year of the artist’s major retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (now the Buffalo AKG Art Museum) in Buffalo, New York, the painting captures Still in transition, setting aside the dense, encrusted surfaces of the preceding decade for an increasingly open and luminous idiom.

A decade later, PH-589 was among the works chosen for Still’s solo exhibition at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery in New York in the winter of 1969 to 1970.

The landmark presentation marked his return to the city after seventeen years of self-imposed withdrawal from public view, and it would prove to be his last one-person show at a commercial gallery during his lifetime.

Comparable works from this period are held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, New York; and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., among others.

The present work installed at Marlborough-Gerson Gallery, New York from 1969-1970. Image/Artwork: © 2026 City & County of Denver, Courtesy Clyfford Still Museum / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Surveying a quarter century of Still’s work, the exhibition drew immediate critical attention, all the more so for its setting at Marlborough-Gerson, then the foremost postwar gallery in the world and home to the artists or estates of nearly every Abstract Expressionist of significance, among them Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Adolph Gottlieb, and David Smith.

Reviewing it in Art in America, the critic Grace Glueck declared that Still’s temperament “can match Soutine’s anytime” and described his recent paintings as “spare yet lyrical landscape abstractions, done in a range of glowing colors brilliantly juxtaposed.” She cited the present work as an example: “In one ‘minimal’ horizontal canvas, for instance, a free-floating yellow form is poised above a blazing red one, the two ingeniously connected by a frayed black kite-string of line.”

The show also prompted a significant reassessment by the critic Patrick McCaughey, who placed Still’s monumental abstraction within a lineage reaching back to the Gothic and Romantic imagination.