Still getting his own way

By most accounts, the late Clyfford Still was a difficult customer -- a grumpy, self-imposed isolationist who hoarded his paintings, told collectors which works they would be buying and once took back one of his paintings from a patron by slashing it out of its frame. One reviewer dubbed him the Unabomber of abstract expressionism

Contemporaries remember how Still for years refused to exhibit his work in New York because it was “too corrupt” before agreeing to a 1980 exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- after it allowed him to hang his own work and curate the show.

“I can’t think of another time that has been done,” said Lewis Sharp, the director of the Denver Art Museum who was working at the Met at the time. Still died later that year.

For all of his attitude, though, there is no questioning the wonder of his jagged-looking, mural-sized works filled with bold colors and heavy strokes. Jackson Pollock once said: “Still makes the rest of us look academic.”

Yet it seemed the full scope of Still’s work would never be seen by the public. Of his 975 paintings, 750 remain in his estate along with 1,300 pastels, and his will says they can be shown only in a museum built exclusively for his work.

Now, 24 years after his death, the city of Denver has agreed to build such a museum under a deal negotiated by Mayor John Hickenlooper, who traveled to New Windsor, Md., to speak with Still’s widow, Patricia, about terms and conditions.

“It will be one of the few opportunities to commune with a true genius,” the mayor said. “When they unrolled the paintings I was in awe.”

Still’s technique can best be described as “color field” painting. Instead of representing some object or person, he splashed color on the canvas in jagged formations that could suggest one layer of color had been torn off to reveal another one underneath. Unlike Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, who used relatively thin paint, Still worked with impasto -- paint laid on so thickly that brush strokes are visible. Still didn’t like to part with his paintings because he believed they needed to be seen together to be fully appreciated.

Hickenlooper said he expects the $24-million museum to be a jewel for the city, a 24,000-square-foot building that will display just 75 paintings at a time, plus some of the pastels. The paintings are big -- works from the 1940s average 4 feet by 6 feet, and paintings from the 1950s average 9 1/2 feet by 12 feet. The pastels are much smaller and are on paper.

It is hoped that Patricia Still will also give her husband’s archives to the new museum.

Still’s works are rarely sold -- those he donated to museums may not be sold -- but his “1960-F” fetched $3.1 million in May.

About 750 of Still’s paintings have never been exhibited. A handful are at the Met. However, the largest collection -- 33 paintings -- is at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., where news of the Denver museum was welcomed.

“There is a whole cache of work that I really think is going to wow us,” said Douglas Dreishpoon, a curator at the gallery. “I think we are all a little relieved. Works of art have rights. They have lives.”

Unlike the paintings of contemporary Rothko, there is nothing comforting about Still’s work. He flashed intense colors across the canvas almost like a matador waves a red cape in the face of a bull.

It’s risky to try to define his paintings; he deliberately didn’t title most of his works and ended up removing the names from many that he did.

Born in 1904 in Grandin, N.D., he grew up on the plains, the son of Canadian immigrants. He became interested in painting as a teen and studied the masters he later rejected as conformist. Some of his earliest works recalled Grant Wood’s “American Gothic” -- mundane subjects ranging from grain elevators to snowplows.

He graduated from Spokane University in 1933, later teaching art at Washington State University, Richmond Professional Institute and California School of Fine Arts, as well as working in defense factories. By the mid- 1930s, he was moving away from representational art and a decade later had broken away from the previous artists he had studied.

While Pollock became almost a household word, cooperating with mass media, Still disdained self-promotion and efforts to explain his work. “I don’t expect people to like or understand them,” he once said.

Once the new museum is built, the art world may finally be able to judge Still’s place in abstract expressionism. It will hold 2,000 works, many on paper.

Not everyone is applauding.

“I think it is bizarre. He certainly is important, but does he deserve a shrine? It repels me,” said Dore Ashton, a retired art historian.