What can be known of the man who forcibly turned his back on the commercial art world in the early 1970s? This question may well be the province of the new Clyfford Still museum, which bests any other hagiographic museum dedicated to a single artist’s work, in possessing 94% of his lifetime output: 825 paintings, 1,575 works on paper and 3 sculptures. The inaugural exhibition at the new space designed by Brad Cloepfil of Allied Works Architecture, co-curated by director Dean Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam, features 110 Still works.

Earliest is PH-45, a small still life of colorful river stones and lupine, painted in 1925 when Still was 21.  This is followed by a 1927 western landscape with a factory or grain tower, a plume of smoke rising, and a vast horizon punctuated by a long, red train. Even in his earliest landscapes, Still’s affinity for color and vertical shapes is evident.  He painted trains, farm workers, sweeping fields and broad skies. Then, switching to the figure, he turned nearly mannerist, in works featuring elongated faces and limbs, while exploring the physical, emotional and psychological effects of hard labor on men.

In PH-77 from Depression year 1936, blood trails down the arms of the men chaffing wheat, their bodies bent beneath a blackened sky. The grotesquery of arms nearly as long as legs prefigures the 1937 work in which men, in PH-343, begin to merge with machinery, before five years later Still moves to showing solely outlines, shapes and shadows.

1944-N No. 1 (PH-235) shows Still having made a canvas of complete abstraction, using layers of  black pigment cut with a deep red outline, a hint of vivid yellow, a drip almost of white and in the lower right corner, an emerald green.

Still said that if you look “with unfettered eyes you may find forces within yourself that you didn’t realize.” One painting that continues to resonate long after standing before it is PH-129, 1949. It’s a smallish canvas, featuring thick layers of burnt umber and goldenrod sliced  by storm cloud gray with the palest lavender. There are hints of hidden green and then in the upper left quadrant the merlot red and black tones that Still preferred. It was painted in San Francisco, when he taught at what is now the San Francisco Art Institute.  Still claimed that behind all of his work was the figure. The tall verticals express a life force.

In gallery five, dedicated to the 1950-1961 years when Still lived in New York and painted amid AbEx brethren, the scale of works increase dramatically. These works will look familiar to viewers who have seen Still’s in the Museum of Modern Art or San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, for example: jagged shapes locked in bold color fields, or raw ungessoed canvases pierced with color.

Two of the late paintings on view are magisterial. PH-9292 from 1974 is nearly 15 feet wide. In this horizontal canvas, the vertical gesture, expressed in Still’s signature black pigment, is more lightly applied, jutting into bare canvas, punctuated by white. There is a thin red vertical near the lower middle of the work and hints of color in dabs of magenta and yellow. The swirling motion in the canvas is like the wind blowing the jagged shapes in all directions, clockwise and counterclockwise. Not all works succeed for me, some have too much zigzag motion in them, but I left the museum realizing that Clyfford Still’s contention that his work needs to be seen all together, was correct. The gestalt is symphonic.

Still was serious about his painting and what it meant. Sobel, Anfam and others have dozens of possible future exhibitions to present yet unseen works by the artist. Scholarship, until now nonexistent will likely increase. But the question remains, though, once the school field trips come and go, and the novelty of the new wears off, will this museum with its $10 admission price be appealing to a public with a millisecond attention span more interested in snapping photos with their smartphones than actually spending a sustained time looking at the paintings as Still wanted? With an art viewing public that can go to art fairs for a viewing hypermarket, is there a contemporary art lover capable of seeing the majesty in Clyfford Still’s vision?

CU Boulder Gets New Museum

Visual Arts Complex joins museum, education functions

Grammy to Artists: Who killed the music?

Kris Lewis and Will.i.am collaborate with Denver art dealer David B. Smith to co-curate a Grammy visual arts exhibition of 15 artists reflecting on Who Killed the Music? The artists get their chance to call out who, and in turn connect to the new “I Am” scholarship fund.

Colorado Creates new Grant Program

Colorado Council on the Arts replaces a former grant program with a new “Colorado Creates” initiative, as Governor Ritter, before announcing he will not run for re-election, announces three-pronged legislation to support the arts.

In Colorado, Things to Watch in 2010

Leanne culls out as things to watch in 2010: How DAM director Christoph Heinrich will keep working to transform the controversial Hamilton wing through art, and how Colorado will keep nurturing its creative economy while the indie types still get the shortest stick.

Artist’s Try to Embrace DAM

Christoph Heinrich, curator and director of the Denver Art Museum, invited 17 contemporary artists to “embrace” the Daniel Libeskind-designed Hamilton Wing.

Art Attendance Drops in the Mountain Region

A greater percentage of adults attend arts events in the Mountain Region than the US average artgoer, but arts attendance has declined 10 percent in the region between 2002 and 2008. The bright side? Increased participation via technology.

The Greening of Las Vegas

City Center in Las Vegas is touting itself as the largest green and sustainable development in the world. With six LEED-gold certified buildings and an onsite power plant, the development is definitely greener than anything else on the Strip, but sustainable? Not.

Tobin Collection Deals in Theatre

Robert L.B. Tobin left a collection of books, etchings, drawings and maquettes spanning four centuries of European and American theater to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. A newly expanded museum houses the riches. Right: Eugene Berman was a Russian Jewish painter and set designer, included in the Tobin Collection.

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Well, I can’t help but post his to my blog. Bootjack Ranch is officially the most expensive real estate in Colorado. But truth is far from the opinion and comments generated on HuffPo about this property.

Bootjack Ranch is owned by friends of mine. People I greatly admire. It was designed to be a full-time family home and retreat center. The couple that owned it lived in our tiny town and their children went to public school with our children and they gave graciously and generously to this community. More so than other prominent wealthy families that also own ranches in this town (The Bass family of Texas).

The owner is a real estate developer whose grandfather had a homestead near here. It was his dream to help develop this community and grow it into a viable town where his children might someday live and work. But the town ran him out with the slogan and campaign to “Keep Pagosa Pagosa.” It was the classic “evil” developer versus the small, poor community. He was demonized for tearing down buildings that were about to fall down. Town Planners allowed three story structures to be built up to the sidewalk a block from land this developer owned and then changed the requirements and said he could only build one-story structures set back from the sidewalk. (He could have sued, but didn’t. Not his nature. He wanted to be a partner, not a foe). He wanted to create something viable and special. He had a vision.

Anyone who visits Pagosa from the outside looks at it as a place with huge potential to become something else. What they don’t see is that the will of the people in power is to keep the town just the way it is. They do not have a vision for the future. They may whine and lament about not enough tourists to keep the restaurants open or good paying jobs, but they don’t know anything else. The people in power have lived in this community for generations and they don’t leave. They don’t travel. They don’t visit other places. They don’t even know that they can be something else. People come from the outside push and push and change them a little and then get frustrated and move on. It’s the history of this town and it will always be the history of this town.

You see, Pagosa Springs is a small town surrounded by a larger population of outsiders and second homeowners. The outsiders have no political power. The power sits in the hands of the smaller town population. Let me explain.

The Town of Pagosa Springs is the only incorporated municipality in Archuleta County. The population of the county is a little more than 12,600 (5086 households, 2045 families) and has grown by 27% since 2000. The population of the town is about 1,600 (633 households, 415 families). These households control the county even though the largest population is centered just west of the town in an unincorporated development called Pagosa Lakes. The median income in the town is $29,469 and about 14% of the population lives below poverty level. The median income in the county is $53,200. The county residents, though impacted by every decision the town council makes, do not get to vote in town elections. The town annexed all the commercial real estate and collects taxes which it splits with the county, but most of the population lives in an unincorporated area and doesn’t have a voice in government except on the county level.

The residents of the town are descendants of ranchers, sheepherders and loggers who established the community. It’s not a wealthy mining town with brick buildings it’s a more blue-collar town with wooden structures that have burned over the years and the town has been flooded more than once. The town is known for its hot springs. Waters the Native Americans deemed as sacred, but not as a place to live, as a place to visit for healing.

Pagosa Springs sits in the San Juan Basin and is surrounded by the 3 million acre San Juan National Forest and borders the largest wilderness area in the nation the Weminuche. Most of the county land (65%) is National Forest or Southern Ute tribal land. So there is already a cap on how big this community could ever be because there is only so much land available in which to grow. And therein lies the rub. The town fathers (they’ve had the same mayor for 30 years) want people to stop and eat and visit the local businesses, but they want to “Keep Pagosa Pagosa.” They fought every idea the developer had to help the town grow and literally forced he and his family to give up their dream of creating a community for the future.

Today, the town is struggling with the economic downturn and will remain a spot on a highway for a long time to come. Unless of course Red McCombs can figure out how to build his Village at Wolf Creek and turn the last rustic ski area in Colorado into a resort. (Hint: create a three county partnership and devise a green development plan of reasonable size).

The location of Bootjack Ranch is spectacular, the fishing is great, the views are breathtaking and the current owners are supporters of Music in the Mountains. It’s a pretty darn cool place to listen to live chamber and orchestra music under a tent. It’s too bad the community has no vision and is deeply divided and split. It would make an excellent resort, a spectacular retreat, and it comes with a lot more acreage than any of the other properties in the list. Alas. It will take a very special buyer or someone who doesn’t care about the politics of the community to make it work.

Perhaps Red McCombs should buy it.