Summer Vacation Redux #30: Denver: Clyfford Still Museum

And the final stop in Denver--the final stop on my Summer Vacation of chasing the Total Eclipse of the Sun--was the Clyfford Still Museum. Clyfford Still was an American Artist of the 20th century. He was born in 1904 in Grandin, North Dakota and lived to the age of 75, dying in 1980 in Baltimore, Maryland. In between, his life and career as an artist spanned the nation and evolved from Realism to Abstract Expressionism along the way.

The list of places Still lived is not exhaustive, but it does read like a continental ping pong ball match.  Northern Maryland; Western Washington state; Southern Virginia; San Francisco, California; Manhattan, New York; Alberta, Canada....  And everywhere he lived as a young man and artist, he seemed to have found resonance in the bleak and the spare. 

These austere works morphed into nearly cartoonishly ghoulish images of people around the time of the Second World War and by 1942 his paintings had taken on a nearly perfect abstract identity.  After the war and throughout the rest of his career, the mature Abstract Expressionist style of creation became his signature.  He new and admired the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.  You can see in their friendships the cross pollination of ideas, particularly between Newman and Still.   And this is the heart of why I love Abstract Expressionism.

Trust me when I tell you that this son of an autoworker from Detroit didn't always think this sort of art was art.  My affinity for it came at a price.  The price of learning and being willing to image things beyond the concrete is worth the knowing.  Discovering a way to appreciate and enjoy Abstract Expressionism gave me the ability--nay, the freedom--to take an image and run with it without any fear of contradiction.  Whether I think of these works from some desire to find factual meaning; OR, I just let my emotions speak to me--doesn't matter.  The openness always shows me something worth spending time unraveling.  What I think is a psychological reflection of who I am.  As a rabid practitioner of the "examined life," exploring and appreciating Abstract Art (like ALL art) utilizes a skill set that helps me to see beyond the obvious in everything.

In the world of Abstract Expressionism my mind reels with connections--sees them, makes them, needs them, desires them, and almost always finds them.  It's an Artistic Safari in which no paintings are harmed along the path to conquest and discovery.  Enough of the conflated metaphors, just check out these examples of Still's paintings, and enjoy the meaning you discover in them.

 The architecture of the building harkens back to the minimalist aesthetic of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and a more post-industrial starkness.  And while this might speak to some dystopian sensibility, here is comes off more like the Rothko "Chapel" at the Tate Modern Museum in London, or the Newman "Stations of the Cross" instillation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (which I don't think exists any more...)  Yet the idea of the sacred is still present.

 On the ground floor is a series of displays of images and artifacts realted to Still's life and career.  The winter landscape is of his farm "home" in Westminster, Maryland early on in his career.

 You NEVER see his pre-Abstract work.  It is a gift and a window into his evolution.

 American Gothic....Still style?

 And the wheel turns......Although this painting also gave me an image of Picasso's "Three Musicians" as penguins!

 The majority of the museum looks like this.  Spare, open galleries with massive mature works of Abstract Expressionism by Still.

 At no point are the paintings "crowded".  Everything around them is very antiseptic, clinical, cool.

 A one point on the second floor, I discovered this open exterior "garden" patio/balcony.  It was open to the elements and yet confined by the ubiquitous lattice work that defines much of the building's non-concrete facades.

 Between the slats, you get a really lovely image of the front sculpture park and the North Building of the Denver Art Museum.

 Although an early work, I chose to end my sharing this.

I immediately saw within it more than a simple skull. I see Still's very contours and himself represented.  Look at the comparison with a photograph taken of him.  Don't you agree?