A Museum Focused on Clyfford Still Opens in Denver

The Late Abstract Expressionist Painter Wanted His Work all in One Place

There is Norman Rockwell’s museum in Stockbridge, Mass., Salvador Dalí’s in St. Petersburg, Fla., Marcel Duchamp’s in Philadelphia, Georgia O’Keefe’s in Santa Fe, and Andy Warhol’s in Pittsburgh—and now Clyfford Still has his own museum in Denver.

            Clyfford Still?
            In the 1940s and early 1950s, Still was in the pantheon of American Abstract Expressionist painters. But as an independent sort, he departed from the New York scene, and in 1961 moved to rural Maryland. When he died, virtually all of his lifetime work was stored in his barn. His will, executed through his wife, said that the art would never be sold separately or be shown with other artists.
            Virtually that entire body of work—825 canvases, 1,575 works on paper and 3 sculptures—has now been deposited in the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, which opened on November 18. The project has been seven years in the making.
            Like Rockwell, Dalí, Duchamp, O’Keefe, Warhol and a few others, Clyfford Still is among that elite group that has an American museum devoted to its work. After his early success, up to 1952, Still broke from the gallery system and stockpiled his art. After his death in 1980, his will required that his artworks stay together. A number of large museums appealed to his wife to donate the collection. But it was Denver’s mayor—and now governor—who persuaded her in 2004, a year before she died, that the western city was the place to entrust her husband’s legacy.
            Still was a son of the West. He was born in North Dakota of Canadian parents. He moved to Spokane, Wash., for most of his youth, lived on a large wheat farm, and began his painting career doing what looked like “regional” painting—images of workers, farmers, and rural landscapes. Suddenly, he turned to complete abstraction. He was among the earliest of the Abstract Expressionists (some say the first) to use extremely large canvases, a scale that he liked in old-masters mural paintings. However, his large work was very “minimal”: He could cover an entire 13-by-19 foot canvas with a single color, then apply just a few jabs of other colors at an edge or corner.
            Critics of his work say he fell into a stylistic predictability. Many of his paintings have a “lightening” motif, jagged thunder-bolt-like lines overlapping each other. Nonetheless, his kind of “Ab Ex” painting is apparently in high demand, if only because of the name and hard-to-get status. This explains what happened at a Sotheby’s auction in New York a few days before the Clyfford Still Museum opened.
            On the evening of November 9, four of Still’s paintings fetched a total of $114 million on the contemporary art auction block. “Up in the skybox [at Sotheby’s], the Denver officials were toasting themselves with champagne, or perhaps it was Coors,” said one report. The $39 million museum was paid for by private donors, so the sale was necessary to produce an endowment for the museum, its trustees have said. The idea of a museum selling its art for cash is frowned on in the profession (it is called deaccession). Even so, the surviving Still family did not object, and Denver needed a cash flow.
            The custom-made museum (with 28,500 square feet of space) has special features. Foremost, it will show only works by Still, according to the artist’s will. The museum is just a few blocks from the Denver Art Museum, so the reclusive painter nevertheless will be in a larger context of other artists.
            The top floor of the two-story museum has natural lighting. On the bottom floor, visitors can also see the glass-enclose storage area, where many of the non-exhibited paintings will be visible on racks. At its opening, the museum features an overview of Still’s styles and experiments, seen in 60 paintings, 45 works on paper, and 3 sculptures. These date from 1925 to the late 1970s. About 200 of his paintings are on the gigantic-sized canvases, so a few of these will dominate.
            Many artists try to control their work with the same alacrity as did Still. However, most of those artists go to the grave undiscovered. Other artists are the opposite of Still—they put their work up for exhibit and sale as soon as the paint is dry. Clyfford Still did offer exhibitions at a few major museums. But he played the game his own way. As rarely happens, his strict intentions continue to be fulfilled.
            A few of the museums devoted to a single artist open their doors to others. The Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe is overwhelmingly a showcase of her work. Yet it also is dedicated to “O’Keeffe’s art shown with that of her contemporaries [and] works of living artists of distinction.” The Andy Warhol Museum is dominated by 8,000 of his own works, but regularly shows other artists as a main feature.
            We will watch and see what happens with the Clyfford Still Museum.
            In the meantime, all of his works are in one place, shown together, protected in perpetuity, and brooking no comparison with other artists. It’s about as honorary a monument as any bygone artist can ask for. If there is life after death for an artist, this must be its highest earthly form.