2011年11月20日星期日

Denver's Clyfford Still Museum

Save for a quirk, the new Clyfford Still Museum that opened over the weekend in Denver's downtown cultural district is nothing less than a marvelous model for what a single-artist museum can be. Virtually every aspect of it is designed to maximize a visitor's encounter with Still's often riveting art.

What's the quirk? Still kept almost every painting and drawing he made. The museum estimates that its collection, a 2004 and 2005 gift to the city and county of Denver on behalf of the artist by his widow, accounts for nearly 94% of his output.

Most single-artist museums, such as those for Vincent van Gogh in Amsterdam, Georgia O'Keeffe in Santa Fe and Andy Warhol in Pittsburgh, have to make do with leftovers, the best material long since dispersed. Although they can (and often do) support important research, their galleries typically leave a lot to be desired. Barely mediocre collections make them shrines to artistic personalities rather than their art.

Not in Denver. Still, notoriously cantankerous,Although the pain of Wholesale Glaze Tiles For Floor is felt in the chest pretty much withdrew from active participation in the art world in 1951, seven years after he lit the fuse for nothing less than the Abstract Expressionist movement. His six-decade career began about 1920, when he was a teenager teaching himself to draw, and ended with infirmity around 1977, three years before his death at 75. The galleries at the Still Museum, with more than 825 paintings and 1,575 works on paper from which to choose, can present optimal reckonings of his art.

In fact, my sole complaint about the museum is its needless $10 admission fee. Ironically,the Wholesale Mosaic Tiles For Countertops From China Manufacturers virus is not completely it's the kind of institutional tactic that put Still off the art world.Discover huge collection of cheap Wholesale Wooden Style For Bathrooms,

Denver raised almost $32 million for this magnificent project but fell short on establishing a $25 million operations endowment. An unfortunate decision to sell four paintings at auction earlier this month resulted in record-breaking prices, which will yield an endowment of $85 million to $95 million -- three to four times the goal. To compensate for what the public lost in forfeiting those paintings, the museum should drop the admission charge.Buy christian art Wholesale Solid Color Glaze Tiles For Countertops From China Manufacturers online

The opening installation is a knockout. Museum director Dean Sobel and adjunct curator David Anfam have selected 28 early figurative paintings, 36 abstractions and 49 works on paper for the inaugural. (Three small, totemic wood sculptures -- the only ones the artist made -- are also on view.) The curatorial aim, brilliantly realized,,Wholesale Ceramic wall tiles For Kitchen From China Manufacturers for sale oil paintings buy paintings original painting art is to secure Still's artistic reputation, which has languished somewhat among those of his peers.

Still's breakthrough came in 1943-44, when he made the first Abstract Expressionist painting. The selection shows where that monumental work, "1944-N #1," came from, then amply displays the peaks he reached in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s. Just six paintings represent the 1960s and 1970s, after he moved to rural Maryland. The late work is lighter, more effervescent, with some unexpected intimations of Monet's late waterlilies. It hints at future surprises to come from the museum's shows.

Anfam once aptly described Still's work as considering a painting's surface to be "hostile terrain." No wonder he ended up painting with knives and trowels, rather than a brush. His startling "1944-N #1" doesn't describe a hard-bitten natural landscape so much as create a painterly equivalent for one.

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