In this enormous painting—measuring more than 9 feet high and 12 feet long—Clyfford Still’s trademark colored cracks sluice the canvas with crisp, serrated edges. Made with a palette knife in thick layers of impasto, the jagged crimson, black, and white shapes are defined in areas of accreted paint and punctured by tiny crags of electric blue and deep yellow. Although Still’s imagery has been compared to lightning bolts or fissures in the earth, he cited immaterial sources: “I never wanted…
