(This is Part 2 of my Denver! Who knew? series. Check out the rest here.)
It’s not everyday that you get to go to a museum in honor of someone who once called museums “the biggest fraud ever perpetrated on the American scene.” Thankfully for anyone who’s ever written about Clyfford Still, he’s endlessly quotable and quite opinionated. A terrific combination.
Denver’s new Clyfford Still Museum is one of the few artist-only museums in the country (others include Andy Warhol in Pittsburgh, Georgia O’Keeffe in Sante Fe, and Jackson Pollack in East Hampton.) Mr. Still took his distaste for museums seriously, which is why you won’t find much of his artwork anywhere else.
Mr. Still was a father of the modern art movement, specifically Abstract Expressionism. The brilliance of this museum, and frankly of Mr. Still, is that the collection spans his entire career, from a landscape painter to his final years in wholly abstract expression, and guides you to the eventual modern conclusion. If you’ve seen Mr. Still’s modern art work at the SFMOMA, chances are you politely mm-hmmed and continued on — raw canvases splotched with massive black shapes and yellow crevices. At this museum, though, modern art makes sense.
via The Clyfford Still Museum
When Mr. Still passed, his will stipulated that his collection go to an American city that would house his artwork in a dedicated museum. Mr. Still’s widow turned down offers from San Francisco, New York, and 16 other cities for over 25 years. And then suddenly, she chose Denver.
Given the Denver Art Museum’s thoughtful and inclusive approach to art (which I’ll get to in a later post), this isn’t surprising. The museum’s nine galleries are arrayed on one floor under a canopy of undulating oval skylights, with ribbed cement pillars providing separation of his distinct periods but also tantalizing glimpses of what’s to come or where we’ve been. As you gaze at the Impressionistic paintings of the flat, desolate prairies of Alberta, Canada in the 1920s, you peak through cutouts to his 1960’s abstract paintings. The paintings inform each other. Next door, paintings of farmers-as-living-skeletons during the Great Depression become increasingly dark and grotesque, morphing slowly into abstract caricatures and leading to the absolute darkness of the 1940’s.
via The Clyfford Still Museum
With the dawn of World War II, Mr. Still’s canvases go black, layers of matte black paint suggest charred earth, with violent streaks of red and white. Glimpsing through and around the concrete pillars, you know he emerges from this darkness, but he never returns to still lifes, choosing instead to explore the limitlessness of canvas and paint. By now, you feel like you know Mr. Still and you continue on his journey as a fellow being and not as a voyeur. The art brings him to life.
via The Clyfford Still Museum
Mr. Still’s break from the art world and New York came around the same time as his leap into modern art. After a childhood in North Dakota, Washington, and Alberta, Mr. Still spent his 30’s teaching at the San Francisco Art Institute (then the CA School of Fine Arts). He briefly moved to New York, but in 1952, Mr. Still left. He disliked New York, calling it a “miasma of evil, culture quacks and charlatans.” He shunned contact with the press or art critics (“bone headed bullies“) nearly completely. He turned down requests from the MOMA and other art museums for pieces to add to their collection. He rarely even sold any of his art, instead choosing to sell a piece every now and then only when he “badly need[ed] the money.”
via The Clyfford Still Museum
He instead lived out the rest of his life in rural Virginia and Maryland, continuing to paint and teach, continuing to only sign his first name on his paintings, a practice he adopted when he first started out in rural Alberta so as not to embarrass his parents. As he finished one painting, he’d roll it up and begin another. He could have been a rich, well-known artist — his art sold for $60-80,000 even in the 1960’s, and they now go for $35-65 million — but that was never the point.
An art world shunned can be a spiteful thing, and they were mostly ruthless when it came to both Mr. Still personally and his art. He was a “megalomaniac” since he didn’t want his art displayed in a traditional and sterile museum setting, grouped with other modern artists and lacking any context. They disregarded the nuance that Mr. Still had an issue with museums generally, not just as far as his own work was concerned, and instead declared he “was determined that his artwork be accorded not only high visibility but a kind of sacred preferment.”
via The Clyfford Still Museum
After an exhibit at the Met in 1979, the first time most critics had seen most of his artwork, the critics came across as half scorned-lover, half sanctimonious “elites.” The New York Times art critic described the collection as “curiously limited“. His artistic sensibility was “small minded and woefully Puritanical.” By alienating himself from the art world, he “had made himself immune from further artistic thought.” His art stopped progressing once he left the art world and New York. You see, Mr. Still’s mind needed the New York art world, and his art suffered without it.
This is really not even the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Mr. Still and the art world critics. The same New York Times critic also once wrote an article merely to inform everyone that another critic had changed his opinion on Mr. Still. A newsworthy item to be sure. Can’t you just feel the oxygen being sucked out of the room?
Thankfully, this gives us, the average art viewer, a lot of room to judge Mr. Still for ourselves, which was really what Mr. Still wanted. As his daughter said just as the Clyfford Still Museum finally opened, “Dad had more faith in the viewer than what is written about the work.”
For those of us on the outside, it’s not clear why a boy from North Dakota had to like New York City, or find value in the New York art elite. Or that this is a reason to judge him so harshly. Denver, a western city for a western artist, seems to have understood Mr. Still and given him a museum that he, and art lovers, truly deserve.
