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"To be stopped by a frame's edge was intolerable," said Clyfford Still in 1963. (1) The tone is familiar. Still's statements nearly always quiver with imperious indignation. Yet his meaning is elusive. The edge of the frame is a premise of painting. How could Still have seen himself as painter and believed, at the same time, that he need not tolerate the enclosure of the frame? A canvas has edges, and those edges put a stop to the imagery of every painter, Still included. This is an obvious fact. What is the point of railing against it? There is no sensible answer to this question. All we can do is look at Still's paintings and try to intuit the nature of his rage against the framing edge.

A chance to do that was provided last summer, at the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington, D.C. With 39 canvases--the earliest from 1944, the latest from 1960--the Hirshhorn exhibition presented a stirring drama: a major style emerges, states its premises with unqualified insistence, and then pushes those premises to astonishing extremes. This story is well known, but not in as much detail as one might expect, given Still's prominent place on the roster of postwar American painters. Leery of dealers, critics, curators and collectors, he was extremely reluctant to let any of his work out of his hands. When Still died in 1980, his estate consisted of nearly 2,000 works, 750 of them oils on canvas. These paintings and drawings cannot be seen until, in accordance with the artist's last will and testament, an American city builds a museum and devotes it exclusively to their exhibition. (2)

In 1964, Still decided that the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo was worthy of a gift of 31 paintings. Eleven years later, he gave 28 more to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Pooling these bequests, the two museums sent them on a European tour in 1992. Ending its travels in Buffalo and San Francisco, the '92 exhibition was deja vu all over again for American audiences, which for decades have been able to see Still in bulk only at the Albright-Knox or the San Francisco Modern. The Hirshhorn show was something new--and one of the more impressive curatorial feats in James T. Demetrion's long and distinguished career at the museum's helm. Assembled from a wide array of museums, foundations and private collections, the exhibition was superbly balanced, with no point in its 16-year span underrepresented and stunning works at every turn.

At the heart of the Hirshhorn show hovered a black canvas named after the years of its execution, 1951-52. Thirteen feet wide and nearly 10 feet high, it looms up and spreads out like a slab of monumental architecture. Still himself called it "the monster." In the lower right-hand corner, a smooth patch relieves the rough grain of the blackness. Nothing relieves the blackness itself but a thin streak of brown along the left side of the canvas and an even thinner streak of white that reaches from top to bottom edge, roughly two-thirds of the way to the right. Still applied his paints with a palette knife. If we see this white streak as a crack in the troweled-on pigment, the effect of architectural grandeur intensifies.

See it as a glimmer of light--perhaps a streak of distant lightning--and solidity evaporates. We are enveloped by night sky: moonless, starless, fathomless. This is Still at his most Gothic, insisting--like Poe or Hawthorne--on the spooky side of the American sensibility.

In the seven years before 1951-52, he invented all his characteristic devices, including suggestions of curling leaves, bat wings and ragged, wind-ripped clouds. Thus Still's closest affinities among 19th-century painters are to Albert Pinkham Ryder, Ralph Blakelock and other land-scapists with a penchant for the darkness that lurks in the wide-open spaces. Jackson Pollock considered himself one of Ryder's heirs, and I believe that Still is another, though it needs to be said that his mature work counts as thoroughly abstract (as does Pollock's). However strong Still's allusions to clouds and the vertiginous canyons of the Southwest, his paintings are never landscapes in disguise. That is, he never orients his imagery to a horizon line. Up and down are always ambiguous. Wall-like paintings that expand--and dissolve--into evocations of the sky can also be seen as if from above, like maps.

The upshot of this spatial ambiguity is heightened physical presence: when so many pictorial fictions are in play, we focus hard on palpable facts. We follow the flow of texture, watching choppy currents of color spread over the surface toward a border with another color. And another. Texture becomes form. Impacted surfaces open onto depths. Imperceptibly, the palpable once again becomes imaginary. We are deep in Still's bleak and strangely gorgeous universe. The evolution of this cosmos was complex, and the Hirshhorn exhibition did an impressive job of tracing it.

In the very beginning is May 1944, a late-Surrealist landscape inhabited by a spindly silhouette: a body thinning as it ascends, to become in embryo one of Still's characteristically jagged streaks of color. That streak appears--newly born, so to speak--in an untitled painting from the following year. Originally called Self-Portrait, it can be read as a representation of the artist reduced to the gesture he makes against a dark void. In the next few years, his gestural traces widen and multiply. Marks become shapes, and as they writhe across the surface, the void is divided into interlocking zones of color. Arriving quickly at the jigsaw-puzzle or pinto pony-hide effect that he never entirely abandoned (an early example is 1946 No. 1), Still made it increasingly difficult to distinguish figure from ground. Then, allowing certain shapes to predominate, he arrived at the near-monochrome 1951-52 and the dazzlingly yellow 1951 No. 2.

Bordering or splitting these expanses of a single color with slivers of contrasting hues, Still showed an affinity to Barnett Newman, who by then--the early 1950s--had begun to send his vertical "zips" across serene fields of red and blue. The two painters were acquainted. As Brooks Adams notes in his catalogue essay, they may have met in 1946, when Peggy Guggenheim gave Still a solo show at her Manhattan gallery, Art of This Century. However, by the time they had begun to offer complementary definitions of the American sublime--Still's heavily worked and portentous, Newman's smooth and luminous--the rough edges of Still's temperament had driven his colleague away. No less suspicious of artists than of anyone else in the art world, Still believed that Newman had lifted the idea for his "zip" from him. This seems unlikely and, in any case, irrelevant. There is no precedent for the way Newman's vertical streaks open up the pictorial field and charge it with the feel of the infinite.

The latest of Still's quasi-monochromes on view at the Hirshhorn exhibition was 1955-D, a big, nearly square slab of red that manages to be at once bright and grandly dismal. Still could endow even a high-keyed color with a quality of foreboding. Here, the shadow of a black shape looms up under the red. In other canvases from the mid-'50s, the artist's characteristically jagged forms have broken into full visibility. Remaking his "pinto" paintings of the late 1940s at a larger scale, Still no longer interlocked his shapes as tightly as before. As the 1960s approached, he began to leave wide swaths of the canvas uncovered. In 1959, irregular islands of yellow and orange float in a sea of unprimed canvas. As this description suggests, the look of mapping persisted. Yet Still's shapes were becoming more cloudlike, and after 1960, the last year represented in the Hirshhorn show, his evocations of the sky grew increasingly stronger. The weather of his art grew calm. There are late works one would like to call joyous, hesitating only because reminders of Still's Gothic mannerisms are so plentiful.

Restrictions on the Still estate made it impossible for Demetrion to begin this exhibition with early work. The catalogue makes up the lack with an essay by David Anfam, which begins by tracing the artist's escape from the regionalism of the 1930s. Anfam points to the incipient abstraction--and grandiose scale--in the grain elevators and snowplows Still was painting in the late '20s and early '30s. Next, gigantic figures appear in pictures of the Western mountains and plains. Slowly, human and geographic forms merge. Anfam is especially good at teasing out the cues Still took from the European modernism he professed, as a self-proclaimed hero of New World culture, to despise. By 1944, the date of the earliest work in the Hirshhorn exhibition, the merger of self and world is complete. Self, of course, is the senior partner. Thus it made sense for Still to say in 1961 that, despite the allusions to landscape, we can hardly keep from reading into his art, "I paint only myself, not nature." (3)