1951-T No. 3

Clyfford Still, 1951 · Gallery 401 · Floor 4

So. This is the third one. Not the third painting he made that year. The third time he made this painting. Nearly eight feet tall. Mostly black. Paint dragged down in long strokes, top to bottom, thick enough to leave ridges. Purple down the left side, with a stripe of blue in it. Bare canvas on the right. A white shape with a bite out of it. An orange one. And a streak of yellow way out at the edge. Then MoMA gets involved. In 1952, MoMA puts Clyfford in a group show. He only agrees because the curator, Dorothy Miller, gives his paintings a room of their own. The first version of this hangs in that room. This one doesn't exist yet. Two years later, the museum asks to buy it. But there's a small problem. By then, Still has destroyed it. He's already made a second one and sold that to a collector. So he paints MoMA a third. That's this. There's a fourth, too. That one he keeps. Across his career, he did this fifty-nine times. His explanation was simple. If the idea was good enough, it deserved more than one stretch of canvas. The man kept records. What he'd sold. What he'd lost. What he'd destroyed. And his own files describe this one as "deliberately inferior." "Hastily made." The one he sold to the Museum of Modern Art. Bottom left, down in the purple, he signed it. First name only. Clyfford. Fifty-one. Back when this one didn't exist.

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