DENVER, COLORADO—As a fine arts graduate, I must confess that it was my first time to hear Clyfford Still’s name. Yes, I know the stalwarts of the Abstract Expressionist movement from Jackson Pollock to Mark Rothko to Helen Frankenthaler. But Still escaped my radar. And yet here he was, spoken with such ardor and respect by Colorado-based theater artist Jorge Vargas Ledesma. He was taking me on a quick downtown tour of Denver by car preparatory to a walk on foot.

But even before I came face to face with Still’s large-scale (from floor to ceiling) works at the museum that carries his name at 1250 Bannock Street, a short walk from the bigger neighbor, the Denver Art Museum, Ledesma regaled me with stories of how Still had the courage of his convictions. He kept most of his works and refused to sell to a hungry art market.

Not that he was conscious of his greatness. He just felt that, and this was stipulated in his will, “the paintings must be kept and exhibited in a space that was exclusively dedicated to the collection,” Ledesma said.

Like any other kid

Who is Clyfford Still and why is he so deserving of a museum that Ledesma calls one of the city’s “best-kept secrets,” but most deserving of becoming a more popular “pilgrimage site” for art enthusiasts and just anybody infatuated with colors?

In the book “Colorfully Courageous: Clyfford Still” by Jason Gruhl, the artist was said to have grown up like any other kid who “played, went to school, read books…and got in trouble. He loved baseball, Beethoven, piano and poetry, but of all the things he loved, painting was his favorite.”

Painting was frowned upon by the father who expected the son to help in the farm “and to take life more seriously.” But the father gifted him with his first tubes of oil paint and canvas, anyway.

The young Still visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City right before the Great Depression. But he emerged from the experience disappointed. Gruhl wrote, “The paintings were beautiful, but they didn’t feel right to him. He wanted to see how the artists felt on the inside. He wanted art to say more.”

Furthermore, “fear, poverty, and sadness made it hard for people to hold their heads up and stand tall…and this upset Clyfford deeply,” Gruhl continued. This was when Still began to paint not only what he saw but, most of all, what he also felt. This required him to travel across miles to observe landscapes, people and faces. At the museum, one views early works all in the representative vein. Memories of Filipino social realists like Pablo Baens Santos and Antipas Delotavo come to mind.

Soon, Gruhl wrote, Still no longer needed familiar subjects. Instead, he “was exploring all kinds of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. He was no longer bound by the edge of a frame, the bristles of a paintbrush.” Still painted using the impasto technique and wielded palette knives, not brushes. Thus, there is almost a three-dimensionality to his brushstrokes that are invitingly tactile in appeal.

He made his living by teaching at art schools so he was fairly relieved of the pressure to sell works. Besides, he didn’t want to sell—he was convinced that it was better to view an artist’s body of works by seeing them side by side and figuring out their interconnections.

3,125-piece collection

And so when he died in 1980, his widow Patricia was left with about 3,125 pieces which represented 93 percent of Still’s works in his lifetime. Apart from that are his archives—journals, drawing notebooks, correspondence, etc.

Ledesma told me that then Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper promised the widow that the collection “would be given all the support it deserved by the city and that it would be considered a premier and unique destination where museums in the USA were concerned.” What clinched the decision, as Ledesma liked to add as a juicy aside, was the mayor telling her that if she donated the estate to a city like New York or even Washington D.C., it would just be another museum among many.

To Ledesma, who has lived in Colorado for 25 years and seen the museum open in 2011, the works of Still “allow for my active participation in finding their measure in my life. As such, the process is always dynamic, always present, always alive.” 

He brings visitors to the museum “because of the singularity of the experience that I hope they will take from the visit and the unique perspective that the museum offers in terms of an architecture designed specifically to house the entire life’s work of Clyfford Still,” he said. “The thought and design process is nothing short of spectacular. The collection is also a premier example of America’s contribution to the world of Abstract Expressionism.” 

The first time Ledesma entered the museum, which covers 28,500 square feet, he could only call on a foreign word to describe what he felt. He said, “The French have a word for it: Bouleversè.” In short, he was shaken to his core.

Did he ever imagine doing a theater piece with a Still painting in the background? “Interesting, but no,” Ledesma said. “I can, however, imagine Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’ designed with one of Still’s canvases as a starting point.”

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