Tyler Green Modern Art Notes

This is part three of MAN’s profile of Clyfford Still. Part one, “Clyfford Still: A cantankerous painter,” is here. Part two, “Clyfford Still: The birth of abex?” is here. The Clyfford Still Museum opens next month in Denver.

In the late spring of 1975, Clyfford Still and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Henry Hopkins walked through the museum’s galleries. On the walls were 28 paintings that Still had just given to the museum, the second large gift to a museum. In ‘exchange,’ Hopkins committed his museum to keeping a gallery of Still’s works on view at all times, in perpetuity. Still walked through the installation, soaking in the experience. He turned to his gallery-companion and said, “You know Hopkins, they have the power to kill.”

Still was right, sort of. The paintings are trauma painted with pigment. In the 1930s, Still painted mild abstractions of farmworkers whose arms were streaked with blood earned cutting wheat or killing chickens. Those thin red streaks would remain in his art for decades, providing a reminder of origin, of pain and maybe of intent. Throughout Still’s career, his paintings would stay rooted in the drama of the West. Sometimes Still’s paintings feel aerial in their perspective: like a skydiver managed to jump with a canvas and a palette knife, recording what he saw on the way down. Other times they seem like shards hurtling through a plain, scything a surface bare. Still’s best paintings seem to show long-term destruction, as if the paintings’ Creator had compressed millions of years of geologic process into two dimensions: Wind exfoliating land, sun leeching its color, rivers cutting through land, rocky earth, dry grass, and canyons remain. Still’s colors look like they were once bright, then scorched. [Image: Still, Untitled, 1959. Collection of SFMOMA.]

It’s one thing to paint with a sense of anthemic drama and scale, it’s quite another to, four years from the end of your life, to boast that the paintings themselves have the power they depict. Why would anyone say that?

It is not a coincidence that of all the great American abstract painters, only Still’s abstractions are violent. To Still the paintings were weapons — a connection he made in letter after letter, decade after decade.

“He had such an adversarial role that he had carved out,” said Bob Buck, who worked with Still when he was an associate director at the Albright-Knox, told me. “It was like he couldn’t stand being an insider. He was an outsider all his life. The rebel fringe.”

While there are examples of Still’s strange comportment going back to the 1940s, it was after Still made his fourth and longest-lasting move to New York in 1950 that his relations with art world peers became particularly unusual. It was during a decade of living in New York that Still established himself as a great painter — and it was where he became an equally difficult figure. [Image: Still, 1956-J, No. 1, 1956. Collection of the Modern Art Museum Fort Worth.]

There’s not time to detail all of the ways in which Still drove away anyone who might embrace him or his work, so a few examples will have to suffice. The Museum of Modern Art tried to champion Still throughout the 1950s – and to be accepted by MoMA was to be on one’s way to being A Great Artist, a sobriquet that Still craved. MoMA included Still in group shows throughout the decade. It purchased his work for its permanent collection. (Still thought he had the last laugh on that one: He sold the museum what he called “deliberately inferior” copy of the painting the museum thought it was buying, apparently as punishment for MoMA’s failure to purchase the painting Still wanted it to purchase.) MoMA wanted to include Still in shows that would travel throughout Europe and it wanted him to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, one of art’s highest honors.

This thrilled Still less than you might think. Witness Still’s response to MoMA’s Venice invitation: “I would not permit agents of the Museum of Modern Art to enter my hallway much less see my work or to exploit it if avoidable. You may use my name in refusal. I know them to be arrogant, malevolent, and deceitful in all their machinations.” He thus became only the second artist to refuse to represent his country in Venice.

In 1961 an art magazine made a routine request for permission to reproduce a few Still painting in its magazine. In a letter signed by his wife Patricia but almost certainly written by Still, he responded: “By what twist of logic you can expect Mr. Still to acquiesce to the exploitation of his painting to sell an apocryphal magazine article is indeed curious. When one considers in addition that not only has the substance of the article not been seen, but is, or is to be, written by a man whose antics and ambitions in the art world Mr. Still holds in utter contempt, and who obviously has not the slightest knowledge of what Mr. Still’s work has been about or what it means, one can only conclude the desire borders on insolence.” [Image: Still, Untitled, 1956. Collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art.]

“Sometimes he used her as a little bit of a wall, a shield,” Still’s daughter Sandra Campbell told me. “No letter went out without his reviewing it.”

In 1968, collector and historian Betty Freeman wrote a book about Still, the kind of manuscript that would help elevate him to a position of popular prestige. Still nixed it.

In 1976 SFMOMA wanted to give Still a thorough, canonizing, full retrospective. He said no. (He held out for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which surveyed Still’s career — with the artist’s heavy input — in 1979.)

Artists were also Still targets. Still regularly claimed that Barnett Newman stole his ‘zips’ from him, that Newman was not to be trusted. Still and Mark Rothko were once the best of friends. They fell out when Still decided Rothko was too commercial – Rothko was willing to sell his paintings, Still wasn’t, at least not on the terms Rothko was willing to. On the day Rothko committed suicide, Still dialed his friend Gordon Smith, the director of the Albright. When Smith answered the phone, Still quickly dispensed with the pleasantries and said: “Gordon, evil befalls those who live evil lives.” Stunned, Smith quickly ended the call and then wandered through the offices of the museum, telling his staff about it over and over again. Bob Buck told me that he was sure that Smith was trying to expunge the phone call from his memory.

In the course of the year I spent learning about Still, the only art world figure I could find that he maintained good relations with was Gordon Smith. From Still’s point-of-view, their friendship seems to have been born in Still’s (false) belief that Smith despised MoMA and what Still called the “New York gutter gangs” as much as he did. (Still believed that Smith despised MoMA because Smith once turned down a MoMA request for the loan of a Still painting.)

In 1959 Still allowed the Albright to launch a major exhibit of his work, over 80 paintings in all. Early the next year, Still thanked Smith by writing him to tell him about New York City’s response to the show: “Like roaches, they scattered at first. But the herd instinct reasserted itself and they all returned to their mother, the Great Gas Chamber of culture on 53rd Street [MoMA] – jackal-yapping the old clichés and lies to cover their retreat.” [Image: Still, 1948, 1948. Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.]

“For Still, Gordon was almost like a board upon which he could write some things that he had to get out of himself, knowing that nothing of that would ever come back to him,” Buck told me. “That was the confidence that he had in Gordon. And he was right.”

Five years later, in 1964, Still gifted the Albright-Knox 31 pictures. (The museum re-named itself in 1962.) But in the end, Still stuck it to the Albright too. In 1966, the Albright-Knox planned a major Still retrospective, a major airing of the artist’s gift. Just as the catalogue was about to go to press Still called it off. The museum was informed of the cancellation by Patricia, who told Smith’s secretary to tell Smith. Patricia provided no explanation.

Five years later, in 1971, Still told the New York Times that he would have given more paintings to the Albright-Knox if he hadn’t heard that his paintings were lying in water in a museum storage bin. They weren’t.

***

The great irony of Still’s three decades of bizarre behavior is that  nothing mattered more to him than being considered as a painter-for-the-ages, not just in his own time, but in the long-term. (Robert Smithson and the earthworks artists wanted their work to prove itself over geologic time, a position that seems outrageously hubristic now, but which must have seemed downright reasonable in the wake of Still’s near-megalomania.) Yet it seems like nearly everything Still did was designed to push people away from him and his work. The same year he told the Times that the Albright was mistreating his work, he wrote to museum benefactor Seymour Knox to inform Knox of his plans for what would become — 40 years later — the Clyfford Still Museum. Even as Still was self-destructing, he was planning what he hoped would be a shrine to himself.

I don’t know why Still acted the way he did — and his archives, which will provide fuller hints and information, were not available to me when I researched this story in 2005-06 — but as I studied Still I noticed that his strangest behavior often succeeded a significant Cold War flare-up. In the famously liberal art world, Still stood out for being a McCarthyite. I came to wonder how much Still’s tantrums were motivated or influenced by world events. After all, to Clyfford Still the paintings were weapons. They had the power to kill. (Not dissimilarly, his breakthrough into his mature abstract style seems to have come just after Pearl Harbor.) [Image: Still, 1949 No. 1, 1949. The Clyfford Still Estate, courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum.]

There are hints in Still’s letters, which are full of carefully worded references to various evil forces. Still’s language seems to become most extreme after major national events. A letter Still wrote to Gordon Smith shortly after John F. Kennedy was assassinated is a classic of the type, complete with a reference to the Soviets. The letter was Still’s response to a negative review of Still’s late 1963 exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, a show which inaugurated the then-new museum: “The motives underlying the review are calculating and sinister beyond casual credibility,”  Still said. “The killers are on the prowl with the Commissars pointing the way. It [the review] is a murderous document as it was intended to be.”

More: The case of the Hollywood blacklist. In December 1947, ten movie industry figures were censured by the House of Representatives after the a confrontation with the House Un-American Activities Committee. They were believed to be Communists and were blacklisted by their peers. A few weeks later, Still wrote his then-dealer Betty Parsons to explain his first ‘withdrawl’ from the art market. It was one of his strangest letters: “[T]o explain my decision in an adequate way would require a critique of our entire society and the relation of me and my work to it. The pictures themselves contain the fullest answer. And as they are so am I… whatever I do is done to keep the spirit that makes these pictures free, and the work in progress strong and vital.” [Image: Still, 1957-J No. 2, 1957. The Clyfford Still Estate, courtesy the Clyfford Still Museum.]

The next year, a few weeks after Communists seized control of Czechoslovakia, Still wrote Parsons to tell her not to show anyone his paintings.

Then, just after the Soviet Union tested its first atomic bomb in August, 1949, Still sent Parsons another odd letter: “I know that these works contain a force which can be used against the principles which were born within them if they are left to the devices of unscrupulous of vicious men.” Remarkably, Parsons stood by Still until he left her gallery for Sidney Janis in late 1951 or early 1952. Still didnt’ last long at Janis, never showed there, and didn’t show again at a commercial gallery until Marlborough Gallery presented a Still exhibition in 1969. (Remarkably, Marlborough misspelled Still’s name in the show’s catalogue. Naturally Still found out and the catalogues were destroyed.)

Still’s pattern of strange behavior continued through the 1950s: In 1957, the USSR seemed to be winning the Cold War. In October the Soviets had won the first leg of the space race, launching the first satellite to circle the earth. In December, America attempted to launch its own satellite. It blew up on the launch pad and the Soviets owned the heavens.

A few weeks later, in January, 1958, Still, his wife Patricia and one of Still’s daughters took a train from Manhattan to East Hampton, Long Island. Then they took a taxi to the home of Alfonso Ossorio, one of the greatest collectors of abstract expressionist painting. Ossorio owned a number of Stills.

Still and Ossorio had been friends. For several years, Mr. Still had rented a summer cottage from Ossorio, who received a couple of paintings in exchange. Just about the time the USSR launched its satellite, Still turned on Ossorio. We don’t know why. (It might have been because Ossorio had sold one or two of his Stills.) Perhaps as a response, Still demanded that Ossorio return one of his paintings. Ossorio, through a series of letters, had refused.

When the Stills arrived at Ossorio’s home, Still told the taxi driver to stay at the curb. The family entered. Ossorio was in the kitchen cooking breakfast, and Patricia joined him. Clyfford walked to another part of the house. Upon finding what he was looking for — one of his own paintings — Still walked up to the painting, took a knife out of his pocket and sliced out the middle out of the canvas. He rolled it up in his coat, returned to the kitchen and told his wife that the mission was accomplished. They fled the house, jumped into a waiting taxi and caught the next train to New York. [Image: Still, 1951-T, No. 2. 1951. Collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts. This painting was formerly in the collection of Alfonso Ossorio.]

When Ossorio realized what had happened, he sped to the train station. There were dabs of pigment scattered along the train platform, but the Stills were gone.

“He told me that he had excised the heart out of the painting,” says Betty Freeman.

“This is patently [Ossorio’s] revenge,” Still later wrote in a letter. ‘But it is not too effective in that he can no longer personally prostitute them for his ambitions.’

***

In 1961 Still left New York to move to rural Carroll County, Maryland, about an hour northwest of Baltimore. First Still bought a 22-acre farm outside Westminster, then a big, old Victorian in nearby New Windsor.

When I visited New Windsor, I immediately understood why Still had moved there. The edge of town is perched on a hill. The landscape to the northwest fell away and my eyes followed the railroad out into broad expanses of open land that eventually ended, miles away, in the Catoctin Mountains. It’s the kind of vista  that would have been familiar to Still from his years out West. At the end of his life, Still moved back to landscape he had known before.

Still’s denials that he abstracted landscape are legendary. Had he acknowledged it, he would have destroyed some of the myth he’d created – and it would have grouped him in with the other American abstractionists, many of whom were open about how the American landscape inspired them. Still wanted to be remembered as their Moses, not as one of the Israelites. [Image: Still, 1949-G, 1949. Collection of the National Gallery of Canada.]

No matter, Still left bread crumbs. Even after Still moved to New Windsor, he kept his farm outside Westminster. He didn’t work the land — instead he tore down farm buildings so that he could better see his property and the surrounding landscape. His New Windsor house probably had a commanding view of the Catoctin Mountains. He loved to motor cross-country in his Lincoln Mark V, through open spaces, especially in the West. He took his daughters on long car trips. (Still would drive and one of his daughters would read newspapers or magazines to him.) When he visited his paintings at the Albright-Knox, he visited Niagara Falls (and tried to keep those side-trips a secret from the museum).

(Less directly, is it possible to grow up on the Canadian plains or in eastern Washington without being affected by the extremes and the expanses of those landscapes? Many of the great American abstract painters came from the West.)

Still left a final hint about how important landscape was to him. Until just a few years ago, a 1932 mural by a Italian-American regionalist named Gottardo Piazzoni hung in the San Francisco Public Library.  They were known as The Sea and The Land murals because they portrayed California’s two defining features. The five panels that make up The Land [above] are classics of California painting: California’s golden hills fill the frames. The hills burnt by the sun and creased by water that had run down them for centuries. For years — including when Still was in San Francisco — they were considered immensely important civic art treasures.

Still was loathe to admit outside influences. They were myth-destroyers. Throughout his life and at every opportunity, he denied that he was influenced by Cezanne or Rembrandt or anyone else. But in a weak moment, when Still curator Walter Hopps were walking through the San Francisco Public Library, Still stopped in front of the Piazzoni murals and told Hopps that they meant a great deal to him, that they were a key to his art. (Hopps told this to Timothy Anglin Burgard, a curator at the de Young where The Sea and The Land are now on view, who passed it on to me.)

I think what had bothered me about Still’s paintings, that one thing I couldn’t figure out until thattrip to Buffalo, was their violence. As I studied Still I began to understand that violence, both in terms of his background and in the context of his psyche and outlook. Eventually I came to understand why when I look at a Clyfford Still, I feel like I’m falling into a well.

Previously on MAN: Clyfford Still part one, part two.

This is part two of MAN’s profile of Clyfford Still. Part one, “Clyfford Still: A cantankerous painter,” is here. The Clyfford Still Museum opens next month in Denver.

Clyfford Elmer Still was born on November 30, 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota. He was an only child. (A sister died at birth.) A year after Clyfford was born his parents, John Elmer Still and Sarah Amelia Johnson Still, moved to eastern Washington. When Still was about seven the family moved again, this time to a homestead in Canada. For the next several years the Still family would divide its time between farming in Bow Island, Alberta, where they kept cows and chickens and grew wheat, and Spokane, Wash., where John also worked as an accountant. [Image: Hans Namuth, Clyfford Still, 1951. Collection of the National Portrait Gallery.]

Young Clyfford was interested in art at an early age. At his mother’s encouragement, he rode a horse five miles to play the piano and to look at art in books. When Still was 14 his father gave him a set of paints. Perhaps he took to them too well: A few years later, when Still was away from the farm, his father destroyed his paintings. According to collector Betty Freeman, who wrote an unpublished biography of Still in 1968, Still’s parents fought furiously and Still and his father fought even more furiously. In 1979 Still told then-Hirshhorn chief curator Charles Millard that he inherited “only doubt and laziness” from his father. At about the same time Still told San Francisco Museum of Modern Art director Henry Hopkins that his father would occasionally “drop” him down a well as a sort of punishment. Still would later tuck a well into the lower-left corner of a painting that also shows the two ways out of farming country: wagon and train.

Still escaped the family’s homes in fits and starts. After graduating from high school at the age of 20, Still visited New York and enrolled in the Art Students League twice, in 1925 and 1928. Neither trip took, and he returned to eastern Washington each time. In 1932 Still married his first wife, Lillian A. Battan, drawings of whom are in the Still estate and which may be on view when the Still Museum opens next month. Lillian was the mother of both of Still’s daughters: Diane, who was born in 1937 and Sandra, who was born in 1942. The couple was divorced in the late 1940s.

Few of the paintings Still made before the move to California have been seen in the last 40 years, though SFMOMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn all own a handful of works from that period. A few other early paintings and studies were reproduced in the Hirshhorn’s exceptional 2001 Still catalogue, including an untitled, vaguely abstracted map of Europe that the Hirshhorn curatorial team dated to 1940-41. Still’s widow Patricia, whom he married in New Jersey in 1957 — roughly a decade after Still and Lillian divorced in the late 1940s — was irate at the Hirshhorn’s 2001 publishing of the ‘map painting,’ claiming it was not a Still. (That 2001 catalogue also features the most important essay on Still’s early work. It was written by David Anfam, who will co-curate the Clyfford Still Museum’s initial installation.)

Still moved from Spokane to the San Francisco area in either 1941, perhaps to work in the area’s burgeoning war industries. The catalogue for the 1992 Albright-Knox/SFMOMA exhibition includes a timeline written by Patricia Still. It reports that Clyfford worked in the East Bay as a “steelchecker for the Navy,” from December, 1941 until 1943, and later for other military contractors in the Bay Area. (These details are not included in the 2001 Hirshhorn timeline of Still’s life.)

It was in California, that the Clyfford Still we recognize today emerged, and it was here in about 1943 that he broke through to abstraction. If Patricia’s timeline is  accurate — art historians have typically been a bit wary of Patricia’s accounts — it may offer up an explanation for one of Still’s inspirations for his move toward abstraction: Just as Still was flattening the landscape into the scything shapes that would be come his trademark, he was likely seeing similar abstract formations in the steel he inspected in the Oakland steel yards. (Art historians have long whispered questions about the dates of Still’s paintings, but Clyfford Still Museum director Dean Sobel recently told me that CSM research will put an end to all that. Expect the museum’s first scholarly publication in 2012.)

Still himself never, ever would have admitted that there was any connection between his work during the war and his painting. He hated to talk about the origins of his work. He once took collector Betty Freeman to the Metropolitan to show her what he loved about Rembrandt, only to phone her a few days later to instruct her to forget it all, to insist that he’d made it all up. When Still visited the 31 paintings he gifted to the Albright-Knox, he usually visited Niagara Falls. Former A-K associate director Bob Buck told me that an Albright guard once recognized Still at the Falls and said hello. The next day, when visiting Buck and A-K director Gordon Smith at the museum, Still denied ever having been there. He didn’t want anyone to make a connection between anything — particularly landscape — and his abstractions. [Image: Still, 1944-G, 1944. Collection of SFMOMA.]

This much is clear: Before World War II, Still was a  painter of vaguely surreal, regionalist, often figurative paintings. In 1941 he moved to San Francisco. Either the onset of war or living in and around San Francisco’s vibrant community of artists changed Still’s work.

It was in San Francisco that Still’s paintings became became stark, jagged, abstract and enormous — and that Still first became a great painter. No other American artist reacted to the changing country – and world – so quickly. (More on this tomorrow.) By 1942 or 1943 Still was making paintings were taller and often wider than a person, a scale that must have shocked his San Francisco colleagues. Former Hirshhorn director curator of the museum’s 2001 Still exhibition Jim Demetrion credited Still for being first artist of his generation both to “paint in a heroic scale,” and to “break his ties with the past by painting with no discernible subject matter.” In other words, Demetrion believes it was in San Francisco that Still pioneered the hallmarks of the style that would come to be known as abstract expressionism. Whether Still “founded” abex or not — archives that will first be made available at the Still Museum will be a key source on that point — Still was certainly the only founding member of the movement to develop his abex style outside New York.

San Franciscans certainly took note of what Still was doing: In 1943 he received a one-person exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, the forerunner to what is now SFMOMA. This was the first show to demonstrate Still’s push into abstraction, but in one way it was an ignominious start: The museum wall-label misspelled Still’s name. (It would not be the last time: When Still married his second wife Patricia, the couple’s New Jersey marriage license misspells Still’s name as “Clifford.” For most of his life, when Still received mail addressed to a misspelling of his name, he would return it to the sender unopened.)

While in San Francisco, Still met and befriended Mark Rothko, his first and for many years his best artist-friend. The two discussed working together, even forming a school together. The two would remain tight into the 1950s. But by 1943 Still was ready to move east and accepted a teaching position at Richmond Professional Institute, the school now known as Virginia Commonwealth University. For whatever reason, Still didn’t last long in Richmond. At the end of the 1945 spring term he left the school and moved to New York for the third time. He didn’t stay long — just long enough to have a 1946 exhibition at Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century Gallery (complete with brochure text by Mark Rothko). Still would return briefly to San Francisco to teach at the California School of Fine Arts, but by 1950 he’d be back in New York. That’s when Still emerged as the acerbic, difficult, insulting — and wildly talented — painter we know today. [Image: Still, 1944-N No. 1, 1944. The Clyfford Still Estate, courtesy of the Clyfford Still Museum. This is the painting of which Still sold an "inferior copy" to the Museum of Modern Art. The MoMA painting is here.]

Also on MAN: Clyfford Still part one, part three.

Nota bene: This week I’ll be publishing a profile of Clyfford Still that I wrote back in 2005. Small parts of it have been published previously on MAN, but this is the first time that I’ve published the entire story. I’ve updated it to include recent information whenever possible. Today’s post will be the first of three parts. Part two is here.

This is a story about a great painter and a difficult man, and it begins with the art. The painter, Clyfford Still, was among the most influential American artists of the post-World War II generation. He created canvases that merged the 19th-century American fascination with the enormity of the country’s landscape with the 20th-century ideal of abstraction — and he did it on canvases that were bigger than the canvases anyone else was painting on at the time, at a scale that was as hubristic as the man himself.

Until a few years ago I did not like Still’s paintings. They seemed too macho, too self-consciously heroic. They are often taller than a person and wider than his wingspan. Mr. Still – he insisted that dealers, curators, museum directors call him Mr. Still, a sobriquet that even his wife Patricia adapted in the company of others – spread paint onto canvas as you might shmear cream cheese onto a bagel. Sometimes he used a brush, but often he just attacked the canvas with a palette knife loaded up with pigment that he’d mixed up with oil. I recognized the paintings’ importance, but I did not particularly like looking at them.

Then, a few years ago, I started re-living a scene in museum after museum: I would stop in front of a Still, turn to a friend, and say: “You know, that’s not half-bad.”

My friend: “I thought you didn’t like Still?”

Me: “Right. I don’t. I just mean that it’s good. For a Still.”

I finally accepted my newfound fascination with Still’s work during a 2005 visit to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo. The Albright has one of the top modern art collections in America and, until recently, the largest collection of Stills. On this day I walked out of a series of narrow galleries into the museum’s cavernous main hall, and found a bench near Still’s 1957-D, No. 1 (above, right). Just then, three high school kids skipped in, volume personified. I was ready to shoot them a stern look. But when the kids entered the hall, they stopped. They had each seen Still’s painting at the same time. They fell quiet.

Finally: “Let’s go sit in front of it,” one said.

“Yeah, I bet we can feel it,” came the reply.

Like monks approaching an apse, they fell silent and walked slowly, deliberately toward the painting. When they were six feet away, as if guided by an invisible force, they sat on the floor in unison. For several minutes none of them said a word. As the kids were being baptized, I was being converted. I saw things I’d missed for years. [Image: Still, Untitled, 1947. Estate of Clyfford Still.]

The painting felt like this: When I was in college, two friends and I drove to the Grand Canyon. We found a lonely place on the South Rim and looked at the massive gash in the earth. Feeling a little bolder, we walked out onto a rock that jutted into the canyon. Under the rock, there was nothing for 1,000 feet. A little beyond that there was nothing for 4,000 feet. As my eyes moved down into the canyon, my stomach moved up into my throat. The Still made me feel a little like that.

Soon thereafter I noticed that when my eyes focused on a curled, Cape Cod-like hook of pigment on the far right of a 1951 Still at the National Gallery of Art, the rest of the painting seemed to fall into the wall behind it. I started feeling these ‘falling moments’ as I lost myself in Still after Still.

How had I never noticed? After all, I grew up in San Francisco, where the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has one of the three great troves of Still’s work and is contractually obligated to keep a gallery of it on permanent display. I live in Washington, where the impressive Still holdings at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (eight paintings) and the National Gallery of Art (two more) include two of the painter’s masterpieces. The Smithsonian American Art Museum (two paintings) and the Kreeger Museum also own Stills, as does the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

No matter, somehow I had missed Still. So has most of the art establishment that canonizes painters. Sure: Still is considered a significant American painter, but few critics consider him to be as important, as great, as his peers such as Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko or Willem de Kooning. All three of those artists have been the subject of numerous major, reputation-creating museum retrospectives after they died. So too other great mid-20th century painters such as Barnett Newman, Franz Kline, Arshile Gorky and Adolph Gottlieb. Lesser ab-exers such as Robert Motherwell, James Brooks and Hans Hofmann have been similarly honored. [Image: Still, 1948-C, 1948. Collection of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.]

But not Still, whose last full-career-length survey was a 1979 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, an exhibition that wasn’t so much an independent curatorial examination as a project the museum undertook with the artist. (In 1992 the Albright-Knox and SFMOMA put their Stills together in an exhibition and in 2001 the Hirshhorn put together a show of paintings Still made from 1944-1960. The Still estate made no loans to either show.) If I wanted to evaluate Still’s career I was going to have to book some flights. So in 2005 and 2006 I traveled to see almost every Clyfford Still in an American museum or public collection. I talked to the people who knew him, collected him and who curated exhibitions of his work. My journey took me to San Francisco, New York, Washington, and Buffalo, the homes of the major Clyfford Still holdings and archives. What was I missing? Had Still been miscast as a second-rate painter?

Yes. At least as much as Gorky or Pollock or Kline or any of the other great American painters of the 1940s, Still is the progenitor of abstract expressionism. Still was the first abexer to voluntarily explode the size of his canvases, to use enormity as strategy by which the painter attempts to bowl over the viewer, to give American abstraction the overwhelming scale for which it became famous. (This was first noted by Hirshhorn director Jim Demetrion, who curated the museum’s 2001 show.)

“Of all the abstract expressionist painters, it’s Still’s paintings that have the most physicality,” former Albright-Knox associate director and later Brooklyn Museum director Bob Buck told me. Buck worked closely with Still after Still gave the A-K 31 paintings in 1964. “Still’s canvases are always a foot or two taller than any other ab-ex painting. When they’re in the galleries, they just stand out like nobody’s buisiness. Still liked to see them installed in a way that emphasized that. He was always hanging them over the molding at the base of the wall.”

Still, even more than Pollock or de Kooning, was the hermit-hero who irked – or outraged – seemingly everyone in his path. To New York Herald Tribune art critic Emily Genauer, whose review he did not appreciate, he sent rubber baby pants along with a note that said, “Hoping this will aid in concealing your Sunday afflictions.” [Image above courtesy of the Archives of American Art.] Still was a stinker and he was proud of it: “I can be cantankerous. I haven’t got my reputation for nothing,” he once wrote. His correspondence, snippets of which have long been accessible via the archives of the Albright-Knox and the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art (and much more of which, presumably, is in Still’s estate and will be available to scholars soon), are among the most carefully caustic letters I’ve ever read. “Regards to all those who are still speaking with me,” he signed a letter in 1951. Unhappy when the Museum of Modern Art didn’t buy the painting he wanted it to buy, he sold it an “inferior” version of another work and nicknamed it the “great gas chamber on 53rd Street.” When Mark Rothko committed suicide, Still called a trusted museum-director friend to gloat.

Still didn’t just dislike people, he considered people he disliked to be enemies. For much of Still’s career, to deal with him – to buy one of his paintings – a prospective collector had to share Still’s feelings for Still’s enemies. When pioneering collector Betty Freeman expressed interest in buying a canvas, the first thing Still did was tell her to go look at the paintings he had just given to the Albright-Knox. She did and told Still that she still wanted to buy one. That wasn’t enough. Next, Still told Freeman that next she’d have to meet Mrs. Still. Freeman did, at Child’s Coffee Shop in Manhattan. Mrs. Still asked Freeman two questions: “What do you think of Mark Rothko?” and “What do you think of Barnett Newman?”

These were loaded questions. Still had once been friends with Rothko and Newman, but he had recently terminated the friendships. Still was irate that Rothko was willing to show with a dealer of whom Still did not approve and that Rothko (or his dealer) had increased the price of his paintings to $15,000. As for Newman, he felt that he had visited Still’s studio and stolen from him the idea for Newman’s trademark ‘zip’ paintings, paintings which featured flat fields of color, broken up by occasional thin vertical lines. Still believed he had pioneered this technique in in the 1930s. [Image: Still, Untitled, 1957. Collection of SFMOMA.]

Freeman knew that there was a right answer and a wrong answer to Mrs. Still’s questions, but she didn’t know what they were. Freeman answered honestly: She told Mrs. Still that she didn’t like the work of either. Mrs. Still reported Freeman’s answers back to her husband, who approved of them. The Stills then invited Freeman over to the Still apartment, where the vetting continued. Many conversations later Still sold Freeman a painting for $15,000, $10,000 over the initial price. Still had raised the price to match Rothko’s. Freeman’s Still is now in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the only Still canvas in a Los Angeles museum collection.

So no wonder Still’s paintings are hard to find. Only about 150 Clyfford Still paintings are in museums, most of them in New York, Washington, San Francisco and Buffalo. There are probably about 40 in private collections. Until recently, if you wanted to see enough Clyfford Still paintings to understand the artist’s oeuvre, you had to work. That’s about to change: Next month, the Clyfford Still Museum will open in Denver.

When Still died in 1980, his will specified that all of the art work in his estate be held until a city stepped forward and offered to build him a museum-as-shrine. For 25 years a number of cities, including art centers such as New York and San Francisco, held discussions with Still’s widow Patricia, but no deals got done. Finally, late in 2004, Mrs. Still and the city of Denver came to an agreement that created the new museum. (There’s no real reason why Denver makes sense as The Place. Yes, Still probably drove through Denver many times – he loved to make cross-country car trips in his beloved Lincoln Mark V – but the closest he came to spending any time in Denver was a summer he spent teaching at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Most likely: As Patricia Still realized she was nearing the end of her life and that she had to get the deal done, Denver was the city on the phone.)

The Clyfford Still Museum [at left] will control the vast majority of Clyfford Still’s output, a trove that until recently was unseen – even by experts in the field – since Still’s death in 1980. In fact, with the exception of a handful of works that were included in the Metropolitan’s 1980 show and a couple of other works shown in gallery exhibitions that were not sold, the works in the Still estate have never been seen by anyone.

Until their arrival in Denver, Still’s Stills were kept in a secret Maryland storage facility, probably somewhere between Baltimore and New Windsor, where Still spent the last 18 years of his life. The new museum’s collection includes almost 900 paintings that Still stored by rolling them around metal pipes in groups of six or seven canvases each. An equal number of miniature paintings was affixed to each roll, copies of the Stills therein. (These copies, usually watercolors, were painted by Patricia, a skilled painter who gave up her own budding career to serve as Still’s wife and trusted comrade-in-arms.) Still’s Stills also include about 1,600 works on paper, 99 percent of all the works on paper he made. Most are pastels or oil drawings, a few are lithographs based on paintings.

An initial selection from the estate, along with some archival material and some ephemera culled from the collections of Clyfford and Patricia Still and Clyfford’s daughters Diane and Sandra will go on view when the museum opens on November 16. The initial exhibition has been curated by Still Museum director Dean Sobel and art historian David Anfam (who wrote his 1984 Ph.D. dissertation on Still).

Next month’s opening of the Clyfford Still Museum isn’t just the opening of a new art facility, it’s the unveiling of a mostly unknown oeuvre. It’s also a long-dead artist’s long-planned, self-conscious bid for immortality. In insisting on this facility 31 years ago, Still must have believed that the museum he envisioned would elevate him into the pantheon that included peers he detested, painters such as Newman and Rothko. I can’t help but wonder if Still knew that his best shot at the pantheon would come long after he was dead. That way his work would speak for itself, without its creator getting in its way.

Also on MAN: Clyfford Still part two, part three.