Mark Bradford, a polymath of an artist best known for his big, broad multimedia canvases of densely layered material abstraction, is gay, black and with deep inner-city roots. Parallel to his art practice, he maintains a robust, bricks-and-mortar program for disadvantaged youth in the same South LA neighbourhood in which he creates his multimillion-dollar pieces.
These things you probably know. At 54, Bradford is one of America’s best-known artists, recently selected to represent the US at next year’s Venice Biennale, the international contemporary art extravaganza that equates roughly to the art world’s version of the Olympics.
What you might not know, though, is a fact Cathleen Chaffee, a senior curator at the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York, shared in a recent conversation. “What people generally want to talk about with Mark is his context – about Los Angeles, about mapping,” she says. “But the fact of it is, if you let Mark talk about what he wants to talk about, it’s abstract expressionism.”
The Albright, a hidden treasure of a museum tucked up in Buffalo has been all too happy to host that conversation. Home to a collection of modern and contemporary art that rivals all but the big-city best, the museum invited Bradford to indulge his fascination earlier this year, giving him access to their collection of 34 paintings by Clyfford Still.
The result, Shade, is an experience of intense material unrest, ragged and alive on the walls on which they hang. There’s a temptation, of course, to view Shade as a subversion of America’s high-art canon: abstract expressionism’s presence looms over virtually everything else in American art, an iconoclastic teardown of all that was, whose revolutionary impulse was quickly co-opted to a nationalist agenda (by the late 50s, the CIA was touring abstract expressionist exhibitions as bald-faced propaganda for American creative liberty amid an escalating cold war, from which Still withdrew).
As a group, there’s a surface sameness about the abstract expressionists that can make a postmodern theorist lick their chops: all white, all male (the canon widened in later years to include female artists such as Helen Frankenthaler and Lee Krasner), the ab-ex men’s club has had a target on its back for decades. In a latter-20th-century intellectual landscape that delved deep into identity politics – gender and race both – there was little revolutionary to be seen in a group of old white guys getting fat on a naive notion of painterly purity.
Bradford, though, has little interest in these things. “Looking behind the curtain to find the great Oz – we’ve done that enough with the abstract expressionists, I think,” Chaffee says. “Mark didn’t take on this show to criticize Still. He did it to understand Still better.”
Bradford could hardly have chosen a more inscrutable subject. A giant even among his abstract expressionist peers. “Still makes the rest of us look academic,” Jackson Pollock said in homage.
Still, an uneasy icon, looms large over the history of abstraction in more ways than one. In his lifetime he required institutions who wanted to show his paintings to keep them apart from the work of other artists, which is the only real subversion Shade offers, at least overtly; it would be “an overstatement to say Still would embrace the premise of the exhibition”, Chaffee allows.
Famously persnickety, Still’s legacy has until recently been locked largely away. Aside from a handful of works bestowed to institutions by the artist himself (the Albright’s came all at once, in 1964; the Met has 11; and MoMA has just three), 95% of the work Still ever made – 825 paintings, 1,575 works on paper – had been sealed by his estate since his death in 1980. As per Still’s will, they were waiting for a museum “exclusively assigned to them in perpetuity for exhibition and study”. When such a place arrived, fully funded, to his estate, only then would the full depth of the Still legacy be unlocked.
Finally, in 2004, his wish was granted by the city of Denver, a place to which he had no connection and had never been; and in 2011, the Clyfford Still Museum opened at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, to which Shade will travel next year. The Still component will be expanded, though as at the Albright, Bradford will hardly be subordinate.
It’s hard to see how he could be: at the Albright, Realness, a towering brand-new diptych, squirms with a jagged intensity, like a thing alive. Moving through the exhibition, it becomes clear that Bradford was driven more by Still’s work as an artist – the thickness of his materials, the electric darkness of his palette – than his status as an icon.
Still was unique among his peers for his heavily worked surfaces; where Mark Rothko, to whom Still was close, or Barnett Newman would dissolve technique into the sheen of their colour fields – the former’s smooth bleed, the latter’s crisp divisions – Still exulted in the physicality of pushing paint and scraping his canvases with a palette knife to create landscapes of texture and colour. Bradford, whose works are less paintings than amalgams of materials – famously, hair end paper, newsprint, photographs, coloured paper and colours ground and extracted from various objects, which he separates with clear coats of shellac and then attacks with grinders, sanders and routers – would no doubt feel a strong material affinity.
But Bradford’s commitment to abstraction reveals some important truths about the misplaced idealism of a form that was born, as its practitioners cast it, as the embodiment of pure emotion. Still, who was making work of this cast well before his cohorts, eschewed titles for that reason, institutionalizing the opaque, high-modern convention of “untitled” with names like PH-110 (1949-C).
Bradford takes that history in hand and situates his works instead in a knowable present: Butch Queen, a giant, shambling tangle of surfaces in rough ochre and pale grey from this year, is no less abstract in form than Still’s menacing, monumental PH-271 (1947-8-W-No.2) from 1947-48. But Bradford makes the gesture personal; he owns the work as a product of his life and experience, and refutes the modern ethos of spiritual purity with the complications of real life, lived here on Earth.
That Still preferred – or, really, committed to – inscrutability is no surprise to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with his work or history. “I am not interested in illustrating my time,” he once said. “Our age – it is one of science, of mechanism, of power and death … I see no point in adding to its mammoth arrogance the compliment of a graphic homage.”
But as an undercurrent to Shade, the artists’ differing view of the purpose of their work is a strong counterpoint that makes their unifying material curiosity all the more compelling.
Ultimately, Shade seeks not to create a comparative between two men with radically different experiences of the world; that would be too easy, and too reductive. Shade, rather, illustrates the trajectory of a language that was undeniably revolutionary in its aesthetic, on purely those terms, and more importantly, can be spoken in the here and now in ways that are urgent, relevant and personal as well as universal. It is, ultimately, casting the absolutes of modernist purity in a complex spectrum of shades of grey – where it belongs, and where Bradford is rightly leading it.
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Shade: Clyfford Still / Mark Bradford continues at the Albright Knox Gallery to 2 October. It opens at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver on 9 April 2017.
