Still the master

Mary Voelz Chandler, Rocky Mountain News

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Stephanie Kuykendal / Special To The Rocky

Art handlers turn a 1949 painting by Clyfford Still after it is unrolled for the first time since the artist's family rolled it. Watching the process are art historian David Anfam, third from right in back, Frederick Schroeder, representing the Clyfford Still museum, and Sandra Still Campbell.

1935 oil on canvas.

1936 oil on canvas

Paintings From Clyfford Still Estate

1951 oil on canvas

Clyfford Still Estate

A 1949 gouache on paper painting by Clyfford Still.

Chris Schneider / The Rocky

Sandra Still Campbell, left, and Diane Still Knox stand in front of a self-portrait of their father, artist Clyfford Still, at the Denver Art Museum in November.

Still, photographed by his daughter Sandra, in 1971.

Sandra Still Campbell

Still and his daughters and one of his beloved Jaguar Mark IV's in the early 1950s.

An East Coast warehouse holds scores of Clyfford Still paintings, a result of the artist's decision basically to hoard his work after shunning the New York gallery scene and moving to rural Maryland in the '60s.

Still held his paintings in high esteem, insisting that the few he did sell or lend to museums be hung to his specifications. More often, as he finished a work, he would roll it up, tape the roll and lean it in a corner of a studio. Sometimes the masking tape was stuck to the paint itself.

Those rolls now are slowly being opened, flattened out and conserved for the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver.

In this vault, gloved workers gently pull out paintings already either conserved or in good enough shape to be put on a stretcher and slid into a wall storage rack. Many rolls still carry the small drawings his second wife, Patricia, made to show what was inside.

The artist's daughters, Diane Still Knox (born in 1939) and Sandra Still Campbell (born in 1942), recalled life with Still in an interview with the Rocky. Their memories - edited for space and clarity - paint a picture of a man who lived and breathed art.

Your father had the reputation of being a curmudgeon. Is that fair?

Diane Still Knox: He was a very sociable man . . .

Sandra Still Campbell: . . . and gregarious. He was always talking and exchanging ideas. The curmudgeon came later.

Knox: I really rankle when they call him "curmudgeon." This is a man who had students in his home in Virginia. I was a little kid. These kids were sitting around listening to classical music and Dad talking. He had the longest waiting list at the California School of Fine Art in San Francisco . . . The other teachers hated him. He was the popular one. And what did he do? Talk about baseball, play classical music, say, "Paint what's in you. I'm not going to tell you how to paint. It's an advanced painting class, and you ought to know where you're going at this point."

Why did he move to a farm in Maryland?

Campbell: Going to New York and finding artists like (Mark) Rothko and others, he was so excited about art . . . To him it was a wonderful world to be shared. He goes to New York and Rothko introduces him, and "Oh, I finally have people who will understand. I'm not talking to students, but we're on the same path of creativity and intellectual exchange." And then the disappointment of finding out what was really important to them, which was to be a member of a gallery. How terrible, how political the art scene was there. It was horrible, the humiliation the artists were put to just to be part of a gallery. That's why he never ever signed a contract with them. They virtually signed their lives away. Now we'd look at it as a scandal. It disappointed Dad.

Those were good times, though, right? He was selling work?

In unison: Not much.

Knox: He wanted his work to be seen, but he would only sell to someone who truly understood it. Who wanted it not for a piece of decoration over their sofa, but who understood the high ideas behind this work. It was very intellectual.

Campbell: He wasn't making a product to sell. And when people came in, they would knock on the door and they thought they were going to walk in his studio and choose a painting. That they would decide what was important. And he'd show them out. He never sold or gave a painting away that was not truly important.

Knox: Each painting was as important as the one before and the one that was coming. . . . Each painting led him to the next. Once in a while he would take a quantum leap, and he knew it. "I've got to fill this in, I've to go back and see how I got there."

And sometimes he would go see his work?

Campbell: Dad would get a whim and wake me up at 4 in the morning and say, "We're going to drive up to Buffalo" (the home of art patron Seymour Knox Jr. and what is now the Albright-Knox Art Gallery). We'd get in the car in the dark and . . . we'd pop in unexpectedly in the Albright. We only learned a couple years ago that at the Albright (they) knew to keep an eye out for Mr. Still; the guards at the front door knew what he looked like. As soon as he walked through that door, (director) Gordon Smith would get a phone call: "Clyfford Still's in the building."

Was he checking up on his work? Or did he miss the paintings?

Knox: It was a little bit of both.

Campbell: Some of our best conversations happened on drives . . . it was nonstop exchanges all the way up. A trip with Dad was never dull.

Knox: Dad had three different Jaguar Mark IV's at different times, and they were his pride and joy . . . he did almost all maintenance work on them himself.

What was it like living with him?

Campbell: With Dad life was feast or famine. It could go for months with no contact with the outside world. He painted, he lived, he thought.

Knox: We weren't with him very much, especially as children. He was always in another state, and we would follow, with Mom.

Campbell: He left an impact. If he was there a week or two or a month or two, it was centered all about him. The energy, the impression he left was so important.

Knox: Even at an early age, you knew this was no pretty little portrait painter. He was up in the middle of the night painting when everybody was sleeping. It was incredibly serious.

Knox: When he was in front of a canvas, I think he was truly alive.

Campbell: When he had a good day, he'd be almost drunk from painting. "I got it."

Knox: And he smiled.

So he led a nomadic existence, on the road to find work?

Campbell: More so in his adulthood, really, especially during the war years.

How did he avoid conscription?

Knox: He tried to enlist twice, but he was too old. He was very patriotic. He worked in the shipyards and Hammond aircraft in the Bay Area. He took the inventory of every piece of metal that went into a ship. . . . He'd leave in the dark in the morning. When he came home we had to be extremely quiet. All he heard was this pounding all day long. He was a little bit high strung anyway; he needed that calm. I remember waving goodbye to him. I would be awakened, Mom would hold me. I feel like we did that all our lives, waving goodbye to Dad.

If your father wanted all his work to go to a museum devoted to him, how did gifts to various museums come about? Through his exhibitions?

Campbell: In many ways they were dry runs. If you look, every exhibit was about 10 years apart. . . . "Oh, every 10 years, remind people I'm still alive, remind them there's serious work going on out here."

How did the family get by?

Knox: For Dad, it was (second wife) Patty working, Mom working. We helped out in different ways so he could paint and afford materials.

Campbell: Once in a while he'd sell a painting, and that would buy the bank account the cushion. He didn't have financial freedom until he sold three paintings to (collector Frederick) Weisman, in California, in the winter of '60-'61. In those days, $100,000 (total, for three works) could buy him an income on a farm in Maryland, with fresh air. It was a haven for him. He could live off that modestly on the farm. Patty was good at managing money. They could live very, very frugally. They bought the farm for about $24,000. They spent that year knocking down buildings and making the barn workable.

You say he had a sense of humor. How did he show it?

Knox: He could see the humor in a lot of things. His favorite sports writers were Ring Lardner and John Lardner. He loved Art Buchwald columns. He loved James Thurber. It was kind of few and far between. He was always thinking about his art, always sketching on napkins in cafes, on envelopes, on whatever scrap of paper he had. The mind was always pretty focused on his art. He'd take us to ballgames and plays. That was his respite, and he taught us to appreciate baseball as a sport, how to applaud the opposing team if they made a great play.

Was he a disciplinarian?

Knox: There was "the look."

Campbell: The voice going an octave lower. I think he spanked me maybe twice when I was a kid. The second time I was so terrorized he backed off and said, "My God, this isn't what I meant to do."

So he never did that again. But he had these heavy eyebrows and deep-set eyes - they were hazelish. That picture (the self-portrait in the Still show): That's the look. All he had to do was get the look, and we'd stop cold.

Knox: He had such intelligence and such magnetism that if he walked into a room, I'm not kidding, everybody turned to look. There was an aura about him.

What was it like to work with him?

Campbell: Years later, after Diane went off to get married and have a family, I spent about a year and a quarter at home doing things between jobs. That's when he put me to work. I started the cross-referencing, the photocopying . . . I couldn't deal with the isolation. It was really hard.

I talked "Stillspeak" but I was losing my ability to mix and talk about anything else with people my own age.

I forced myself to leave home, not once, but twice.

What is Stillspeak?

Campbell: It's knowing how to walk the tightrope and what to say and what not to say. I learned very quickly I couldn't argue with him. We could have a discussion, but don't take the other side. It was sort of like I knew the boundaries, let's put it that way. I knew the red flags. If somebody wrote to ask for a painting and if certain words were in there, I knew they would never get the painting.

So he had a temper?

Campbell: There's the big famous story that Diane knows in detail because she was there (in the 1950s). He did cut a painting down off of (artist and collector Alfonso) Ossorio's walls. It was on loan to him, and he was going to send it to the (Venice) Biennale against Dad's will. (Still painted in a studio at Ossorio's home for a summer.)

Knox: Dad had asked for it back several times, and Ossorio ignored it. So Dad, Patty and I got the train into East Hampton and took a cab out to his place. He was a very rich man. Dad walked in and cut the whole center out of the painting. He replicated it later. But to him that painting had died on the wall. It had changed. He folded it up, tucked it under his arm. Patty and I were by Ossorio at the front hall. Dad came in to leave.

He said to Ossorio - he was unaware he had the knife in his hand - "Whenever I give you an order (about my work), you obey it." Ossorio turned sheet white. It was a horrible experience . . . It was Dad's painting, he could do what he wanted with it, but it was very heartbreaking.

Campbell: He thought it had been violated. It was the only time he did it, but he was capable of these gestures.

Clyfford Still: a life

* 1904: Born Nov. 30 in Grandin, N.D.

* 1905: Family moves to Spokane, Wash.

* 1911: Family moves to Bow Island, Alberta, where father John Elmer Still receives a land grant from the Canadian government. Childhood split between U.S. and Canada.

* 1919: Still begins to paint.

* 1925: Begins visits to New York, where he enrolls twice at the Art Students League, but returns to Spokane in the early 1930s to attend Spokane University.

* 1930: Marries Lillian A. Battan; they divorce in 1954.

* 1933: President of student body, and after graduation enters the graduate program at Washington State University; earns master's degree in 1934. Painting is still in a figural manner, with abstracted elements.

* 1939: Daughter Diane born.

* 1941-42: After teaching in Washington state, moves family to San Francisco. Daughter Sandra born in 1942. Still meets painter Mark Rothko.

* 1943: Starts work in war industry jobs, has a one-man exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Art, with work moving away from figuration. Moves to Richmond, Va., to teach. Begins push into the color-rich abstract style for which he is best known.

* 1945: Moves to New York, has first one-person show the next year at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century Gallery. Moves back to San Francisco to teach but still linked to New York (Betty Parsons Gallery).

* 1951-1952: Breaks with Parsons Gallery, and soon after with all galleries. Friendships with artists fail.

* 1957: Marries Patricia Alice Garske.

* 1961: Leaves New York for farm purchased in Westminster, Md. Exhibitions follow at the University of Pennsylvania; gives work to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

* 1966: Buys home in New Windsor, Md., while keeping other property. Occasional exhibitions continue.

* 1975: Gives work to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which shows work the next year.

* 1979: One-person show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

* 1980: Dies of cancer on June 23 at age 75. Will stipulates he will give "all remaining works of art executed by me in my collection to an American city that will agree to build or assign and maintain permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art and assure survival with the explicit requirement that none of these works will be sold, given or exchanged."

* 2004: City of Denver announces agreement with Still's widow, Patricia, to acquire the work.

* 2005: Upon her death, city receives work in her collection and Still archives, meaning 94 percent of his work to come to Denver. Dean Sobel named director of Clyfford Still Museum.

* 2006: Museum chooses building site next to Denver Art Museum's Hamilton Building; Allied Works Architecture, of Portland, Ore., and New York, to design building.

* 2010: Museum's projected opening date.