Denver's new Clyfford Still Museum

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing off its new galleries on Fifth Avenue, and the new Barnes Museum is displaying the full extent of its banality as it rises on the Ben Franklin Parkway. But the art event of the past year was the opening of the new Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

Still (1904-1980), who was critically (albeit briefly) a member of the New York School, was one of the most uncompromising of American Abstract Expressionists. Having found a signature style in his early 1940s, he hewed to it in and out of fashion until his death, rarely exhibiting and still more rarely commenting on his work.

He had an important retrospective at the Met in 1979, which for a good while maintained a "Still room" in its modern wing, but at his death in 1980, some 94% of his art remained in his estate. His one-page will charged his heirs with the responsibility of creating a museum to house it. He left no money to do so— merely a stipulation that the city that built the museum would become the owner of its art.

It will not surprise you to learn that there were no immediate takers for this deal. Museums are risky business, and Still was hardly a household name. Since, like the Barnes Collection, the estate was not to be broken up, its commercial value was nil. Any investment in it would be based on a valuation of the worth of Still's oeuvre that couldn't be tested in the market or, if necessary, redeemed there.

Two decades, and then….

In the meantime, the estate itself remained in lockdown— not exactly a strategy for appreciating value.

Still's widow, Patricia, did her best, but two decades passed without result. Finally, more or less at wit's end, she wrote to a nephew, Curt Freed, a research physician in Denver. The entirety of the letter was as follows: "It just occurred to me to wonder: What would you think of having the Clyfford Still museum in Denver?"

Freed had no connection to art, and Denver had no connection to Still. Improbably enough, however, a cold call to the Denver Art Museum's curator of modern art produced an expression of interest, and, with the strong backing of the city's mayor, a deal was hammered out.

Money for a facility was raised privately (the Denver City Council insisted that tax revenues not be used, a condition as well of the Barnes in Philadelphia); four Stills were sold by Sotheby's to provide an endowment; and the museum opened on November 18.

The new museum, designed by Brad Cloepfil and his firm, Allied Works Architecture, stands immediately adjacent to Denver's Art Museum and looks to be its satellite. Its modest scale means that most of Still's works— more than 800 paintings and nearly 1,600 drawings— will be stored off-site, and what museum-goers will see is a changing exhibition. This will make the need for a full catalogue all the more important, since presumably only scholars will have access to the full collection.

The museum is, in short, a sampler rather than a full-course meal.

Long-jawed Nordics

Necessity, of course, has dictated this course, and no single-artist museum— say, the Picasso Museum in Paris— shows off its entire holdings at once. Nor would 50 rooms of Still particularly enhance the impact of viewing him. The principle that less is more is generally a sound one, though I wouldn't have been averse to a little bit of more in this case. A visit to the opening exhibition was satisfying but still quite short of sating.

The exhibit covers virtually the entirety of Still's career, from the mid-1920s to 1977. Up to the late 1930s, he was a figurative painter, his work more akin to the Russian neo-primitivism of the early Malevich than anything else, although the subjects of his work were the long-jawed Nordic immigrant farmers of the upper Midwest. These were frequently rendered nude and, increasingly, gaunt— there was a depression going on, and the sense of its effect is palpable in these canvases even without overt political references.

At the same time, the increasingly vertical and elongated forms in Still's work were tugging him toward abstraction, and by the end of the '30s— with a nod toward Cubism and Kandinsky— he was clearly headed in that direction. But even in as early a work as PH-782 from 1927 (Still never titled his paintings, except for alphametric and numeric designations) one sees a forerunner of the thin, jagged lines that would characterize Still's fully abstract compositions in the lightning-strike that bisects a country landscape.

Rothko's role model

It's fascinating to watch as the faces and figures of Still's subjects begin to break up into geometrized forms in the later 1930s, and still seem to lurk in the earliest abstract work. Even when all signs of representational form have been eliminated (or sublimated), it would be well to bear in mind his own dictum that "The figure stands behind all my work."

Still seems not to have gone through a biomorphic period such as Gorky and Pollock did on their way to abstraction, but to have achieved a mature style before anyone else in the New York School. Certainly Mark Rothko saluted him as the pioneer who had led the way for everyone else.

The first phase of Still's fully abstract work was typified by large canvases painted all over in rich, darkly-colored textures, cut by thin strips of lighter colors— red, yellow, orange, white or paler blue— that Still called "lifelines," and that recall the lightning streaks of his representational period. These bear some affinity to the zips in Barnett Newman's work, and indeed Newman confessed to Still's influence. But whereas Newman's zips are straight and for the most part strict forms, Still's lines appear brokenly and erratically, like comet tracks or plummeting angels.

A link to Turner's landscapes

Blockier but still jagged passages become prominent by the 1950s, while the ground textures are lighter. With time, Still exposed large stretches of canvas entirely. Within this format, he achieved an increasingly airier and opener effect, moving away from monumental effects to much sparer and gestural ones in his later work.

What all of Still's mature work projects is a primordial authority most commonly associated with evocations of the sublime. This links him to Turner as well as the 19th-Century American Luminist school, and in a certain sense Still's work can be described as absorbed and re-emitted landscape. It's a landscape, though, that's open to the cosmos, and to a sense of the grand violences of natural process.

At the same time, there's no sense of the willed religiosity of certain American Romantics. This is a beauty that offers no consolation.

For me, the major discovery of the exhibit lay in the drawing display. Some of Still's drawings were done in preparation for the paintings, but many are entirely finished works on their own, and the contrast between the effects he achieved from watercolor, gouache, crayon and pastel and the pigments he meticulously ground for his canvases is striking.

So, too, is Still's ability to concentrate his style in a far more compact format. On the basis of the sample on view, he is no less splendid a draughtsman than he was a painter.

A vandal strikes

The museum got some unwanted publicity when, on December 29, a woman named Carmen Lucette Tisch suddenly punched, scraped and pulled at 1957-J No. 2, a large-scale work of alternating red and black forms against a white ground, and, pulling down her pants, attempted to urinate on it.

Prior to her impromptu career as an art critic, Ms. Tisch had, among other things, faced charges of armed robbery. With the memory of this particular work still vivid for me after six weeks, the thought of damage to it, even if reversible, was sickening.

The museum has defended its security system, but perhaps it may need to rethink it. There will never be perfect protection, though, from human squalor.