All language subtitles for Lifeline.Clyfford.Still.2019.1080p.WEBRip.x264-RARBG.eng

(paper rustling)

(gentle music)

- And with that, the cover lot,

Clyfford Still 1949, A number 1.

And started here at 18, 19, 20 million dollars.

Let's bid at 20 million, 21, 22, 23, 24,

25 is already bid at 25.

At 45 million, 47,500,000.

50 million.

Selling then for $55,000,000.

Sold! Thank you Lisa.

(applause)

(violin music)

- [Man] You have the Iberian blacks of Robert Motherwell's

"Elegy to the Spanish Republic" number 126.

- [Woman] And here we have Barnett Newman on one side

on the right hand side of the gallery,

and Ad Rheinhardt on the other.

- [Guide] Here, in the penultimate gallery,

gallery 11, you have 10 monumental canvases

by Clyfford Still.

(mysterious music)

- [Man] Well, Clyfford Still, one of the most enigmatic,

mysterious, toughest, most emotional,

of all the great American abstract impressionists.

- Jackson Pollock said that Clyfford Still

makes the rest of us look academic.

- He was just a very clearly strange individual.

I never know of anybody who was quite so off the wall as he.

- It's a quote from Pollock and I think it's 1947,

when he says, "Clyff Still, Rothko and I,

"we change the face of painting."

- Who's Clyfford Still?

Well, we're still finding out.

We weren't even allowed to know, for decades and decades,

he famously sort of absented himself at the height,

or at the end of abstract expressionism.

- I don't think he removed himself from the world of art,

from the world of ideas. He definitely removed himself

from the art world.

- He had to get away from what he called

the corruption of the art world.

- He was more interested and more firmly convinced

about an artist doing what Still felt

that artists should do.

Paint.

- He kept himself apart, he was a very secretive man.

And if you make yourself an outsider,

then people who look at the movement

are going to put you outside the movement,

as simple as that.

- You know, it's not a popularity contest,

and art and life are incongruous to each other.

I mean, you make a decision that you wanna do that,

it doesn't mean that you're gonna be in favor all the time.

It doesn't mean that you're gonna have,

there are gonna people who don't understand

what you're doing.

Painting is about time.

Painting is about death,

and you're making a physical fact.

And paintings bring you into their present

whenever you get in contact with them.

(guitar music)

- For years and years and years, my parents would take me

to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

to see whatever the exhibition of the time was.

And I have a vivid memory of seeing Still's work

at the museum there, I was probably 10 years old.

And what I remember about it was a particular painting

that I focused on, kind of human sized,

maybe six foot high, largely black painting.

(absrtract music)

And what captivated me was that the title of the painting

listed on the label was "Self Portrait."

There was nothing about this that a 10 year old

could in any way, shape, or form, think of

as a self portrait.

And I was hooked.

I didn't understand this at all,

but I was completely captivated

and that was my introduction to modern art.

(abstract music)

- I was very much impressed not only by

his own person and persona but in terms of his intellect

and his integrity about his own work,

how it was to be displayed,

all those things of course that would drive

museum directors a little crazy perhaps,

but, but that's the way it was with him.

- I loved him but I was terrified of him you know,

because he did look like God as some,

one of the painters so kindly said. (laughs)

- He turned out to be an extraordinary artist,

and I'm proud and lucky that of all his contemporaries

that I got to be his daughter.

- It's a complicated journey that the guy went on.

It's also a real story of America.

- [Man] It was as a journey that one must make

walking straight and alone.

No respite or shortcuts were permitted

and one's will had to hold

against every challenge of triumph,

or failure, or the praise of vanity fair.

- - [Woman] That's the recorder,

tape recorder. (mans voice on tape)

I remember when he bought that,

he came home with it.

- Audio tape? - Audio tape, yes.

- Jesus Christ.

Why didn't you tell me about-- - 30, how many hours

did you come up with Jess?

30? - 34.

- [Man] 34 hours of audiotape.

- Do I know this?

- [Man] Well okay, I want you to hear this.

- [Jess] Which one is this?

- [Woman On Tape] This is our new machine,

we just got it today.

And it's all ours.

- Well on the one hand I'm amazed

at an archival discovery of this kind,

and on the other hand it doesn't surprise me that much

because Still was really very, very,

intent on recording everything he did,

and this is an expression of that kind of mindset.

(dramatic music)

- [Voice Over] Creatively reflecting

the anxious temper of the times is modern art

and impatience with old-fashioned forms and limitations

had launched the 20th century artist

on a restless search for new ways of expression,

and for new techniques.

- If they are to find a place

in the civilization of the next half century,

the visual arts must in effect compromise with the machine.

This can be done, only within the terms

of what we call abstract art.

- Abstract Expressionism was an American art movement

that developed during and after the Second World War,

that fused the relatively recent idea of an abstract art,

with the age-old tradition of Expressionism.

- Before that virtually all the artists

had lived through the Great Depression

and they were marked by that for decades to come.

There's a strong argument to be said for the idea that

Abstract Expressionism really mirrors the age of anxiety

(discordant music)

- Abex if you call it was such a huge movement

in the United States, it went all over the world.

One of probably the largest exports that this country

still has exported.

- It's sometimes called the School of New York

and that's a complete geographical misnomer.

It spans both coasts of the United States

West Coast and the East Coast,

and significantly, Still was actually moving

between those coasts in the 1940s with his Jaguar

- Still, moved around a heck of a lot.

He was peripatetic.

Location, with the exception of Alberta prairies,

didn't mean a lot to Still.

- [Man] Clyfford Still has a very important

one-person exhibition in the Bay Area in 1947 at the

California Palace of the Legion of Honor,

that includes almost exclusively

works that we would now call Abstract Expressionist.

This is the exhibition that Rothko said left not only him

but everyone else who had seen it breathless.

(piano music)

- [David] Still and Rothko talk together at the

California School of Fine Arts in 1946,

and it's no coincidence that 1946 was the very year

when Rothko began to make his breakthrough into abstraction

with his so-called multiform canvases.

- Yes, I was first aware of Mark Rothko

who taught at the California School of Fine Arts

at the same time my dad did,

and we would have dinner with him occasionally,

but I remember he was a presence in the school.

- I think dad thought he found a kindred spirit.

(violin music)

Dad analyzed him, they were good friends,

dad said were kind of different species.

Still was from this Wild West so to speak of Canada,

Rothko was more European, a more sentient person.

- [Man] Interestingly the criticism

that surrounds his exhibitions in San Francisco

starts Still off on this relationship,

bad that he will have with art criticisms.

In 1943 they spell his name wrong twice,

in 1947 I think, the critics are only met with

baffling images that they don't even know how to read

let alone interpret.

Mark Rothko introduces Still to Peggy Guggenheim

who had opened a gallery called Art of the Century

in New York during the Second World War.

- [Sandra] She knew what Clyfford had was extraordinary

and even admitted "I'm really more into surrealism

"but I will show you." (jazz music)

- [Man] Rothko helps stretch the paintings,

wrote on Stills work, he installed his first one-man show.

- And Rothko told him,

"Please come to New York, this is Mecca."

So Clyfford went to Mecca, we all followed.

He liberated their work, their work

changed almost overnight because of him.

They were fumbling, "Where do we go from here?"

And Clyfford provided them with the answer,

get rid of the frame, go inward,

what is that that you have to say and so on,

and their work blossomed.

(futuristic music)

- There exists a fantastic photograph

that appeared in Life magazine in 1950,

that we call the Irascibles Group,

that includes all the seminal figures

of the Abstract Expressionist movement,

and particularly Jackson Pollock, Clyfford Still,

Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman.

Those four who were famously called by Betty Parsons

the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

- I think of what Diebenkorn said about Clyfford Still

when he was invited to go to the studio

in the bottom of the California School of Fine Arts,

he said, "Well, his stuff was very austere.

"it didn't have anything to do with,

with European painting, it was it was fiercely independent."

(discordant piano)

"It was not seductive, it was very American,

"it was rejecting influence."

Well, that's a lot to say

and it's a lot to undertake,

and I think that Clyff stood for that.

- Of the group he was the roughest one.

The edge is a little more jagged,

you can see the paintbrush strokes,

you really saw his hand and you saw the struggle.

You're not sure if he's referencing nature,

you're not sure if he's referencing.

You don't know where those points come from.

- They look like oscilloscopes in a way

and at the same time they're like mountain ranges.

You kind of travel over all the marks

that are painted in the paintings,

so there's a real voyage that you take

when you look at those things.

- [Clyfford] When I hang a painting I would have it say,

"Here am I.

"This is my presence, my feeling, myself.

"Here I stand implacable, proud, alive,

"naked, unafraid.

"If one does not like it, he should turn away,

"because I am looking at him."

- It went well for a time,

but then who did what, when, where, became an issue.

Who painted something first?

Dad would start to back off and back off.

(futuristic music)

- [David] When Dorothy Miller did the "15 Americans" in 1952

she really had a tough time.

Because Still was given his own room,

Rothko was given his own room,

and are almost in rivalry with each other.

Rothko wanted blazing lights

to bring out the intensity of the colors,

and on the other hand,

Still showed a very famous painting,

a big, black painting that's now

in the Art Institute of Chicago,

and he called it a "big black monster".

And it's as if you've got these two artists

really, kind of you know,

fighting against each other almost,

to outdo each other.

- The fact that these two artists fought

for their own rooms at a point in their career

where they were still very young

and not well-known to anyone,

shows a certain audacity, and I think,

belief they had in what they were doing.

- [David] I think after "15 Americans" in '52

the tension between them starts to grow and grow,

until they completely break from each other.

- [Man] Clyfford Still is particularly watching

the path that Mark Rothko takes.

Very actively involved with art museums and galleries,

commercial galleries and various public commissions,

like the Seagram's murals later in the 1950s.

I think this all says to Clyfford Still

that Rothko has gone to the other side.

And I think Still turns out to be right

given the deep depression that Rothko starts to face

in the 1960s that eventually ends with his suicide

in his studio in 1970.

- He didn't begrudge that.

He didn't begrudge that at all.

He understood it, he also understood

that Rothko stopped being creative, growing.

They all stopped growing

as soon as that particular work became important.

Pollock got killed, killed himself.

Rothko did too.

- And dad felt like Rothko had sold out,

and I guess Rothko was pretty upset about that,

because I remember walking down the street in New York,

in the early 60s, and there was Mark Rothko

coming toward us, and he looked so angry.

He looked at dad, and it was just sad,

because he understood what dad was doing,

but he couldn't commit to it.

His excuse was, "I have a family to raise."

- Still, in some ways,

almost predicted this outcome for Rothko.

They hadn't spoken in many, many years.

When Still was in Buffalo visiting his paintings

at the Albright-Knox, the news was delivered to him

and Still was known to have said.

"Evil falls to those who live evil lives."

- He might have said something,

but I just don't ever, never remember him,

talking about Rothko as evil.

Kind of failing his art maybe,

but I never heard him use the word evil once

about any of them.

- Well that kind of quote you know, it's pure Still.

Very aphoristic, very moralistic.

He said what he wanted to say at the end of the day.

He was cutting out because he wanted to be cutting.

- [Clyfford] I told Rothko on several occasions

that he should abandon such nonsense,

forget this myth thing which he was tying up

to the Greeks.

Rothko moved on, back where he belonged,

into his fuzzy Bauhaus, cultural associations,

and was very happy to leave the rigor I set,

for the creative act for his steady manufacture of

varieties of rectangles.

- [David] Well you've got to remember that Still

had a very difficult upbringing,

and unlike most of the other, much more urbane,

New York-based Abstract Expressionists,

Still had a tough life on the Canadian prairies.

(piano music)

The art historian Dore Ashton,

recounted that Still used to talk to her

about shucking wheat until his hands were bloody.

- [Sandra] He was a free laborer to his father

and he was treated that way.

It was nothing romantic about

that kind of farming and survival.

This is struggle, this is hard.

(dramatic music)

When I look at the earlier works,

the romantic trains that he did,

and if you look at the photographs that he took,

and I think it was around 1929,

pretty barren land.

Trains were freedom.

The smoke going across, that's to civilization.

- The vertical is crucial to Still.

Sometimes it might be smoke rising from a train,

it might be a figure, but he said,

"Where I come from, you either stood up and lived

"or lay down and died."

The vertical amounts to a life force,

as he put it, lifelines.

The space is what in the later paintings

will become the extraordinary chromatic fields

and gulfs of the abstractions,

and this struggle between the vertical

and between an empty field-like space

is absolutely central to Still's entire art.

- I asked him one time, I said,

"What is this thing about the lifeline?"

And he said, "Well when I was a little kid

"up in Canada when my father was farming

"on very, very bad land,

"they were digging a well,

"and they dug this well down, you know,

"20, 30 feet something like that,

"and they needed to get somebody down there

"to see if they've gotten as far as the water.

"So they tied a rope around my ankle

"and dropped me down the well slot,

you know, headfirst."

And he said, "It was such a traumatic experience

that it remained with me all of my life."

Whenever I see that lifeline

I think of Clyfford hanging by his ankles (chuckles)

down the well.

(electric guitar music)

- [Clyfford] There always been much imitation,

but the record is still a history

of a very few individuals.

I see Barney for all his energy,

a man of almost pathetic impotence.

With a good mind he is incapable

of transcending ambition.

Only in the total destruction of this drive

or in escape therefrom, will he ever be in a position

to create more than a pathetic act.

- Clyfford Still did not admire Barnett Newman, period.

He reduced Still to a nothing.

Barnett Newman took Clyfford Stills lifeline

and made a zipper out of it on a wall of color.

- We know art is not a race,

but artists themselves, they're,

they're very conscious of how they stand

with regard to other artists,

and no one wants to be left behind.

(guitar music)

Barnett Newman really first discovered his upright

vertical zip no sooner than 1948.

A painting called "Onement, 1"

the point about Still is that he had been

investigating the vertical since the 1920s.

And there was a painting

which was once known as "Quicksilver"

and then "July 1945-R",

which basically consists of a single, snaking,

upright white line, surrounded by a dark brown

abyss of darkness.

That painting we know,

was shown at Peggy Guggenheim's Art of the Century in 1946.

(piano music)

That's two years before Barnett Newman's Onement, 1.

- [Clyfford] Some of these men

are deeply concerned in destroying the priorities

which they know exist.

I am ready to defend everything about those pictures

with everything I have, and I have plenty.

I have ample documentation for every picture

as to date and place, and Newman knows this

and so does Tom Hess.

- [Man] Interestingly, Still forms a close relationship

with Pollock who is living in Long Island

for most of the late 1940s and early 1950s.

- [David] People forget that Jackson Pollock

was one of the very few artists

with whom Clyfford Still never fell out.

In 1956, Still planned to take Pollock

on a road trip west.

- Pollock looked up to Clyfford Still

(piano music)

- [David] Pollock was failing, he was alcoholic.

- [Sandra] Pollock knew that Clyfford was getting ready

to go cross country.

He knew about these trips that happened often,

and he wanted to go with dad,

and he said, "Oh, I'll drive the Jag,"

and dad was "no, no", Pollock was not a good driver.

He was a very dangerous driver

and he said, "No, but join me, let's caravan."

The car that Pollock wanted to drive

is the one that was exchanged for a painting

and a case of booze.

So dad told Pollock, "We'll caravan.

"I'm leaving Trenton,"

where he stored the Jaguar,

"at such and such a time,

"on such and such a day."

And he waited for Pollock, he waited.

No show.

They open up Time or Newsweek,

I don't know which one,

and dad was just heartbroken.

- [David] Pollock had taken

a very different kind of road trip.

(somber music)

The terrible fatal accident he had.

- [Sandra] And it disturbed dad,

he told me the story many times.

- [David] Still recognized Pollock's greatness

and vice versa, I have not the slightest doubt about that.

- [Man] He made things impossible for Betty Parsons.

She was allowed to sell the paintings

but she wasn't allowed to show them virtually.

- After three very successful exhibitions

at Betty Parson's gallery,

he writes Betty with the following information,

"I tell you now that I am withdrawing my work

"from public exhibition."

- [David] Those latter years in New York,

he's in the very epicenter of the art scene

and at the same time is completely removed from it.

And that's a typical Still paradox.

- I think his exit was honorable

and it was not manipulative,

although he was manipulative.

- Well I think there's absolutely

no question about that and it's just it

doesn't matter how you paint or what you do,

you are the only artist in the world,

that's what the ego dictates.

- [Announcer] Just off Fifth Avenue

on a site long occupied by the old-fashioned town dwellings

of the Rockefeller family,

stands the spanking new home

of a nationally important institution,

the New York Museum of Modern Art.

- Clyfford Still had a very

tricky relationship with MoMA.

I think he saw MoMA as the institutionalization

of modernism itself, and that's what he really hated.

He famously referred to it as

that gas chamber of culture on 53rd Street.

- The Museum of Modern Art wanted to buy

one of Still's paintings but one of, to him,

a lesser painting, not a groundbreaking painting.

He wanted them to take the big black with the red line.

(violin music)

I'm quoting my father now, "They did not have

"the courage to buy it."

So what he did, is he went home and made a reproduction

and though he did not literally paint it with his left hand,

he said "Emotionally I painted it

with my left hand, indifferently."

- Well I remember a show that MoMA did

a couple of years ago in which they exhibited

well over a hundred works from their holdings

of abstract expressionism,

and Mark Rothko got an entire room

devoted to his work,

but Clyfford Still had merely, had two canvases

with a David Smith sculpture stuck in front of them.

That kind of presentation showed how,

in a way, MoMA has belittled Still

compared to the other artists.

- I don't think there's any question

there were two sides of Clyfford Still.

Family members and his children described him in one way

as being warm and passionate and a great father.

Well clearly, by other documentation,

there was a different Clyfford Still

who would fight to the end when it came to matters of art.

(upbeat music)

- [Sandra] He turned down the Biennale

at least three times, possibly a fourth.

One or twice, one man exhibits

to represent the United States

because he felt it was a carnival,

he didn't consider it a meaningful

commitment to art of any kind,

it was sort of a road show kind of attitude.

- Still was an outsider.

He was irascible, it's said he could be cantankerous,

he didn't have his reputation for nothing.

Still was someone who didn't go along with the herd.

- Clyfford Still held critics in the highest contempt,

because they felt they were more important than the artists.

They made the artists.

The critics and the dealers made the artists.

If they get on your bandwagon they will take you to the top.

Greenberg, Pollock, all of them had their boy,

and it was their job to write about them and sell them.

They were part of the product package.

He didn't have any respect for them.

He tried, he talked with them,

he tried to educate them.

(upbeat music)

- Tell me when.

"I consider the fawner," oh great,

"called art critic, the least desirable

"of those who've gained access to the work."

(blows raspberry)

I am an art critic.

I could really care less what the artist thinks.

I'm not writing for the artist.

"I have steadfastly tried to withhold the work

"from these characters, for many and obvious reasons,

"not the least being their arrogance and stupidity."

I'm writing for the audience.

I'm writing for the reader.

I'm trying to deliver up a full volume

of my opinion of what I think of the work,

where it fits in, what makes it original,

what makes it unoriginal,

what might or may not be inventive about it, et cetera.

And if the artist doesn't like it I would say,

"Good for you.

"You don't own the meaning of your work."

"Clement Greenberg is really a small and lecherous man,"

I'm told that's true,

"who, if given his own way,

"would prefer to study nudes and sentimental landscapes."

What makes Clyfford Still pretty great art,

is you, and I, and Clyfford,

are looking at different paintings when we look at them.

And better yet, they change every time.

"So, occasionally I relax by writing a letter

"to the likes of the art press.

"Pimps is a much better word."

- [Interviewer] Take it from the top.

Tell me a little bit about that day."

- The day with the Ossorio,

the day of confrontation so to speak.

Well there's a little backstory to that.

- Interesting man.

He would hold musicals in his home.

- Which is, specific painting was on loan to Ossorio.

He would loan paintings, he wouldn't buy them.

It didn't matter that he had money galore.

- [Diane] Alfonso Ossorio inherited Domino sugar fortune.

- [Sandra] Clyfford was in on the West Coast.

(dramatic music)

Ossorio announces I don't know that was through Patricia

or to Patricia or by a letter to Still,

that he's loaning the painting overseas somewhere.

Still gets on the phone to Patricia and says

"You call Ossorio now and you tell him

"order that painting home."

Ossorio wasn't gonna honor Patricia's word,

he felt he had a right to that painting now

and to do it that what he wanted.

Dad came back to New York and on a very gray,

miserable, I think it was in October,

I'm not sure but it was not a pleasant month,

they take a taxi to Ossorio's mansion on the bay.

- Knocked on the door and his,

his housekeeper, this fellow opened the door

and dad wanted to see Ossorio.

Well he wasn't there.

He wasn't around, supposedly,

because he could tell dad was angry.

He was on a mission.

- [Sandra] Diane, Patricia, and Still

were going through the ground-floor

looking for the painting,

and according to what I remember written, Diane found it.

He sends them to the vestibule, shuts the door,

pulls out a knife,

- [Diane] And then we heard

this most awful sound of ripping canvas.

- He cut the center out and left a border

of a couple of feet, folds it up,

puts it under his arm and they leave.

So I've got chills right now that I'm seeing

part of that event.

I didn't know it was preserved, oh my.

Now the story changed a little bit as the years went on

where Ossorio comes down the steps

because the house boy went up to get him,

and dad said, "I forgot I had the knife in my hand,"

and shook it under his face and said,

"When I give you an order about my work you obey me."

- And I think Ossorio was terrified.

He thought he was gonna cut his throat.

And he did refer to it as

"I cut the heart of the painting out of the canvas."

This is my mother when she was early thirties.

Yeah, and he said he deliberately cocked her head back

where she looked stubborn,

because she could be very stubborn,

which would drive him crazy.

(gentle music)

My mother was four and dad was six,

would go hand in hand to church.

I think they knew they were meant to be

at least for a while.

- I think my mom Lillian had

different kinds of expectations.

Dad was supposed to be a professor or minister,

and that was her expectation,

to be the wife of a professor or a teacher.

She was not happy.

She had to wait for him to come home.

- Honestly, all of Stills teaching appointments

ended poorly, usually with disagreements

over schedules or deans and so forth.

In Richmond in particular Still was incensed

that the Dean said in passing

that Still could paint whatever he wants,

but he should be careful about having

students over to his studio and home.

And the thought of a Dean suggesting that Still

needed to seek approval for painting in any which way

led to his departure from Virginia.

- The concept, or almost inevitability,

of a Patricia coming into dad's life,

was there and potential for that.

She was an artist, she was an art student,

and Lilian was no competition,

not that she wasn't beautiful but she was unhappy.

By the time Patricia came,

she was one of the students who came to the apartment

and, you know, waited on bated breath

for everything he said.

Lilian had to produce the cookies

and she felt nothing but a waitress by then.

- [Diane] Alberta, Canada, he built a house there for us.

It wasn't quite finished.

There was no insulation and we were cold,

and then he left.

I thought, "Oh, that's odd."

- [Sandra] Occasionally he'd take us on a drive

and a picnic and it would be Patricia with us, not mom.

Mom was at work.

Patricia was the one person that believed in him

and stuck with him.

Worked eight hours a day and then stayed up

till 1:00 or 2:00 at night when the

artists in those days were getting together.

- [Man] She was also very devoted to him obviously.

She never referred to him as Clyfford,

and I shouldn't even be calling him Clyfford.

If she were here in this room

she would remind me, "You please call him Mr. Still."

- [Sandra] Patricia was a very good record keeper.

She was very methodical and frugal.

She never gave up helping him survive.

- [Announcer] Paris designer Jacques Estrel

unveils his fashions for next summer,

and believe you me, he's way out there.

Yes, he's a great believer in pop art, pop.

And he believes in getting madam out of the kitchen,

utensils and all.

- [David] Pop art is just not on his,

on his horizon at all.

- To him it was an inevitability,

Andy Warhol a cartoonist, a graphic artist.

I think Andy Warhol must have been

the most cynical so-called artist out there.

He played the game!

- [Clyfford] Today the same kind of craftsman,

with probably the same purpose,

and with the same eye on the market,

glorifies the popular taste by placing

in the sanctum of the Art Gallery,

the beer can, the ketchup bottle,

the plaster pie, plastic toilet,

and so as sacred as the term become,

to the the observer or purchaser, gladly accepts.

- By the late 1950s Still,

and I think many of the other Abstract Expressionists,

sense a changing of the guard.

A young generation of artists,

and proto pop artists like Jasper Johns,

Robert Rauschenberg, are nipping at their reputations

and making very different work that in some ways

is critiquing the innovations of the abstract expressionist.

- Still pushes away, distances himself

to the outer world after 1961 increasingly,

and I think he sees that distancing

as a kind of route to his own greatness.

He has to create space which he himself can fill

with his later work.

(electronic music)

Stills' late work basically begins in '61.

- [Diane] In the summer of 1961,

on my birthday, by the way, we got,

dad, Patty, and I got in the car and started heading south

because he remembered the lushness

of the land in Virginia.

The lushness that that land was just, ah.

You can breathe, you can throw seeds and they'd grow.

(gentle music)

They looked at a couple of places

and then found an overgrown 22 to 24 acre farm

that a man had raised a family on and sent to college.

They bought it for about $24,000, about $1,000 an acre,

and that was a lot of money in those days.

- [Man] I think he was searching for a quiet place

where he didn't have these extraneous noises bothering him

and where he could concentrate and work.

Still makes about 375 paintings

during the last 20 years of his life,

more than he had made in the previous 40 years,

with a certain kind of emptying out of forms.

- The issue is, whatever way a serious,

good artist, like Still was,

you clear the noise.

So find the way. Are you going to choose

Clyfford Stills' way,

are you gonna choose Agnes Martin's way of withdrawal?

I mean whatever it is that's the discipline

to be good at anything.

- He was just our dad but he wasn't there all that much.

He made it very clear, very clear,

and he bragged about it once when he said

he leaned over my crib and said,

"I love you babe, but you don't come first."

- I was five years old, we were in Richmond, Virginia,

and I remember sitting in a big leather chair.

I have white knuckles I think you'll notice in the picture.

And he would give me breaks,

but I was scared to death,

sitting there and watching him, watching me.

To suddenly be center of his attention was humongous.

(jazz music)

- [Sandra] And when he reentered our life,

always as a surprise, you know, dad's here!

Life has returned, not to survival,

but something extraordinary.

He had energy, he showed us how to play baseball

which was his favorite sport.

- [Diane] He taught me to throw a ball like a man,

and I just, I loved doing that.

- Still felt that the painter, the artist,

was like a baseball pitcher.

That everything on the field was quiet,

everything was still as, not a play on words,

everything was calm and then when the the pitcher

let the ball loose, everything began moving around.

- [Announcer] Here's Joe Black in the 6th.

Boom, Neville belts it over the fence in right field.

- Another artist once told me that baseball

is an intellectual game.

It's just not a bunch of guys running out on the field

and hitting baseballs and throwing a ball around.

There are endless possibilities of things

that can happen during a game.

- [Announcer] Again the bases are loaded.

Maybe this time, maybe Jackie Robinson can be the hero.

- Clyfford and I talked about that all the time,

and he knew everything.

He knew the statistics, he knew the players,

he asked all the right questions,

and I was overwhelmed that the knowledge that he had.

- [Announcer] Their 4th World Series in a row--

- [David] So loved baseball,

and he saw baseball I think

as a kind of human geometry,

and there's that famous time he says,

"Well look at the spaces between the players."

And that's, that's fascination with how

the human presence interacts with the space around it.

That's very central to Stills' art too, from day one.

- I never talked to Clyfford about one day

owning a baseball team.

(radio commentary)

(crowd cheers)

- [Commentator] The St. Louis crowd

has visions of force faith, as Yankee Joe Pepitone

flies out for the final hour.

- The first memory that comes to mind

about people coming in trying to buy paintings

directly from Clyfford Still, since he had no dealer,

was a man that Frederick Wiseman introduced to Clyfford.

The dealing and wheeling went on,

"Oh, come down $10,000."

You know, these are wealthy people

and this particular person decided,

"Well if I send him four pineapples,

"from like a Harry and David's thing,

"he'll come down in price."

(Hawaiian guitar music)

Well Patty tested one of the pineapples

and she got sick from it.

Dad took the other three and had target practice

with the .22 rifle.

Clearly the man did not get a painting.

- I probably thought about it for a while

and probably wrote several drafts of that letter

because I didn't want him to say no.

And I got a response.

"Mr. Still has asked me to thank you for your letter,

"but to inform you that he has no pictures

"for sale, lease, or loan to anyone at this time.

"Sincerely, Mrs. Still."

One of the things that I was probably taught early on

is that "No is a temporary impediment on the way to yes,"

so I proceeded.

(orchestral music)

I think we met in Baltimore for lunch.

I remember talking about my interests,

and him talking about his interests.

His interest was talking about his colleagues,

painters that he wasn't so fond of.

In the end he had the right to speak that way

because he was a giant.

I wrote another note to him and asked

if he was ready to see me and talk

about maybe parting with some pictures

and he said yes.

Well he didn't trust very many people.

He also didn't love a lot of people.

He was he was very closely knit with his family,

and a few friends, and I guess

I was one of them fortunately.

- In 1964 Clyfford Still decided it was

time to find a home for the paintings.

- One of the capstones for Still in the 1950s

was a one-person exhibition at the Albright-Knox

Art Gallery in Buffalo in 1959.

(staccato music)

- He approached Seymour Knox,

head of the board of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

about whether they would accept a group of paintings

to be kept in perpetuity at their museum.

It was a kind of grand scheme.

- One important consideration of that gift

was that the paintings could never travel

and that they must be seen in their own room

and not mixed with other artists.

- As a museum director I find that to be a bit unfortunate.

I understand it, but in terms of educating the public

and I'm sure he didn't give a damn

about educating the public,

but in in terms of that

that's one of the things museums feel that

they are there to do,

because people have a lot of difficulty, let's face it,

with even something as old as abstraction is.

- When an artist wants their work to be seen en masse,

in its own space, altogether, I get that.

It isn't a grandiose wish at all.

Artists are control freaks,

they get an idea, moves from one work to another,

I have nothing against them wanting

the work to remain together.

Time however treats art different

than the artists wishes, and I trust time.

- When I think about Still I think about my first show

at the Albright-Knox Museum and seeing

the paintings that they have installed there,

and then really rethinking who Clyfford Still was.

What Clyfford Still was interested in

was this slow time-based experience with painting.

That slowed down kind of experience that goes past life.

To make sense of that, it was like, incredible,

and that was at the Albright-Knox.

- You have those moments,

where you remember how art hit you.

It was second week of December in 1979.

I was home from my freshman year of college,

my mom had moved to Buffalo.

(gentle music)

They had just had sixty inches of snow,

which turns out it's not unusual,

dumps from the lake and there it is,

and I was wandering around 'cause I couldn't stay

in her new little house and got out,

and I show up at the Albright-Knox Museum.

I didn't even know the history of how

those cities like Buffalo and Cleveland and things

have gotten quite wealthy and

there have been all these expositions.

So I walk in, and it's this extraordinary collection of

American abstraction and

American muscular spiritual modernism.

So here's the weird thing that happened.

The power went off.

(piano music)

But I remembered this thing that I'd read about Still,

where he says exactly that.

Turn off the lights, the paintings have their own fire.

You think, "Oh, come on" but,

it's there and I felt that as a kid that day,

and I'll never never forget the day.

I don't know how many other times I've been

with paintings in that way.

- It had been my hope that I would end up with

in the four corners of the old San Francisco

Museum of Art building, a room devoted to Mark Rothko,

a room that devoted to Clyfford Still,

a room for Robert Motherwell,

and a room for Richard Diebenkorn.

The four corners would have made it a wonderful

and I think exciting balance.

That didn't, didn't work out for me,

but it did work out for Henry Hopkins.

- The museum already had a couple of his paintings,

a big, big abstract painting from,

that was a gift of the Anderson family in in Palo Alto,

and then this marvelous painting that Peggy Guggenheim

had given to the museum.

A 1944 picture which was the picture

that inspired my background,

my initiation into Modern Art,

and I think when on a visit to San Francisco

in the 70, early 70s,

he really respected and admired

the way his work was being shown,

and I think that inspired him to develop

a closer relationship with the museum and with Hopkins,

and that eventually

resulted in the gift that we did receive.

- So he talked to me about giving

three paintings to the museum which of course excited me,

and over the next year and a half as we talked,

and we talked every time we would talk.

he would add three more, like well,

maybe six would be better,

well maybe we could tell the story with eight,

well we can't really tell the story with eight

it probably would take nine or ten

to really tell the whole spectrum,

and of course, but we ended up with an outright gift

of twenty-eight Clyfford Still paintings,

of which this big red one is one of the prime examples,

though there are actually many in the collection.

He gave a group to the Albright-Knox Museum.

He gave this group to us,

he gave a group to the Metropolitan Museum.

- I think that's juncture where Still starts to

look back on his career and turn it into

one great Odyssey, one great venture.

- It was about the right people will come.

(orchestral music)

They will come, as he did,

all the way from Canada to New York.

On his 21st birthday he was at the front door

of the Metropolitan Museum of Art

waiting for the doors to open because

he was finally going to see the originals not reproductions.

- [Clyfford] Nothing was finally decided.

However, they saw, and I don't think I've ever had

two more receptive guys.

The problem is do I want the entire gallery or just a floor?

- That's better, oh! - So we'll settle

for one floor when the time comes up,

now you'll try to keep it as quiet as you can

for a little while.

- [Woman] Yeah, I'll just yell about

in the apartment. (laughs) - All right.

- He's not having a grand retrospective of MoMA

or the Whitney, it's the Met,

and that is the Met's about the old masters

and Still is very consciously

positioning himself in that perspective.

- [Announcer] The Metropolitan Museum of Art

perhaps the greatest center

of classical art and learning in America,

exerts an influence that is worldwide.

(cello music)

- [Man] For better or worse Still chose all the works

from his own collection and he weighted heavily

his work of his last 20 years.

- [David] I went there December of 1977

and oddly enough suddenly there was Clyfford Still

and his wife and well I was scared to death.

(piano music)

I went up to him and I said I thought

he was a great, great artist and I was overwhelmed

by the work and I think he was okay,

if you know what I mean?

He didn't say a lot.

I think he appreciated someone appreciating him.

- [Clyfford] I had some excellent response

from this exhibition, but some in fact,

almost surprising, Lee Krasner, Pollock's wife,

told Mr. Montebello and insisted

he'd be sure to tell me that

this is the greatest experience in art

she'd ever had in her life. - Wow.

It's quite, it's quite a tribute to me. - I understand.

(futuristic music)

- Of course I remember that day.

Yes, that's Molly Brewer,

I haven't talked to her in 40 years.

Anyway, yeah, she was a student

of Clyfford Stills in San Francisco,

and I rented the front of my studio

to her on 20th Street.

She said "Clyfford Still's coming over today."

I said "Really?"

Said "Okay, yeah, and I, I'll go get some pizza."

Which I did.

I remember what paintings of mine were in my studio also.

There was a painting called

"Giacomo Expelled from the Temple."

I thought he'd like that painting

because it had a, I made it with joint compound

and rope flex which was sort of a plaster,

and I used a palette knife on it quite a bit,

so I definitely related to his paintings.

- [Clyfford] Oh, that's a pretty unusual little bit.

Obviously he read the catalog pretty thoroughly.

- Oh, that's great. - Yes.

- Good. - I'd say the kid

was 25 to 30 years of age, he was maybe 25.

Nice, young, Polish, name of Schnabel, Julian Schnabel.

Looked more Italian, round face, smooth voice,

full of enthusiasm.

Very rugged pictures, images, pictures.

Taking the work seriously.

I had to admit, the guy has roots that

might develop into something.

Originality for himself.

Brings much of my whole attitude about it.

- [Man] By 1977, it's pretty obvious

that Still's getting sick.

He doesn't do much about it, doesn't see a doctor,

and by the time the exhibition at the Met opens in 1979,

he's essentially dying of colon cancer.

(discordant piano)

- [Woman] There's a series of about 40 pastels

on construction paper about six months

before he passed away.

He could feel something coming

but he really wanted to get some last ideas down.

The last pastel in this series,

you can really just see that life force

that's so prominent in his work

just trail off the edge of the page.

- [Sandra] Last will and testament, paragraph fourth.

I give and bequeath all the remaining works of art

executed by me and my collection to an American city

that will agree to build or assign and maintain

permanent quarters exclusively for these works of art.

- For their exhibition study and survival,

and it was really a 20-year quest

to identify an American city who would agree to those terms.

- If you note, it said permanent quarters,

that did not say I want a free-standing building

all my own, that came from Patricia.

Still understood that many of them

might end up in a basement in storage

and they might be shown once every five or ten years.

He understood that.

He did not want it distributed one here, one there.

This is a symphony, or an opera,

with some masterpieces called arias if you will,

or movements.

He saw it as a totality,

that is why there's so many reproductions.

He would sell or give a painting

and say "I wish I hadn't done that."

- It was a huge estate,

nobody had seen it, nobody really knew

exactly what was in it

apart from when it was appraised.

And so, you know, Still in John Goulding's words

as lately as 2000 he wrote that

"Still remains a great unknown,"

and it's absolutely true.

("Vissi d'arte" from Tosca by Puccini)

♪ Vissi d'arte, ♪

♪ vissi d'amore, ♪

♪ non feci mai male ♪

♪ ad anima viva ♪

♪ Con man furtiva ♪

♪ Quante miserie ♪

♪ conobbi aiutai. ♪ - After 1980 it became clear

that my aunt Pat's fundamental mission

was to find a city that would accept

the Clyfford Still paintings in the terms of his will.

Now there was I think some tension in that,

because she very much liked controlling all of this art.

- As devoted as Patricia Still was

to her husband's art and life,

she actually did considerable damage to his legacy.

After his death in 1980

she refused reproduction rights to almost everybody.

She wouldn't let anybody see the art

and I think that was a terrible injustice to

people of my generation,

who were trying to understand Clyfford Still

through 5% of the work in the world.

- After talking to my aunt for quite some time,

I managed to persuade her

that Denver could be a good place for the museum,

and she sent me a letter

giving me permission to go to Denver.

(discordant piano)

And it says, "I was just thinking, what about Denver?"

Well it was hard getting those words out of her

but I got that letter and then

called the Denver Art Museum.

- I'd been in office maybe, I don't know,

a hundred days, and Lewis Sharp from the art museum

called me and said you know, "There's this woman

"who is the sole controller of one of the most incredible

"collections of art in the history of the world,

"and no one's really gone

"and even pitched her in several years."

I was gonna be in DC anyway,

it was gonna be you know,

about an hour and a half drive each way.

You know, it was gonna take five hours out of my day,

that's not a lot of risk for something that could

really create another star

in the cultural firmament of Colorado,

and another reason for people that love art

to come visit Colorado.

Of course, when Lewis Sharp first presented the idea,

I had no idea that 25, 26 other communities had

attempted and failed at persuading Mrs Still

that that their city was the place.

We walked into the farmhouse,

and it was almost devoid of furniture.

One easy-chair in the living room,

but basically pretty barren

in terms of any kind of furnishings.

(discordant music)

Except for, in every room, there were

painting after painting, they are

rolled in these long rolls.

Some of them were in tubes, many of them were not in tubes,

just kind of piled into the corner.

I couldn't help but having my mind run away with

"God, what's in all those rolled up canvases?"

And Clyfford Stills' widow was intensely loyal

to her late husband.

I mean she had foam-core models

of what a museum might look like.

And I grew up in a family with a lot of great aunts

and you know, elderly men and women,

and I've always been very good,

I was trained to be very respectful

and to listen very carefully

when when one of your elders speaks to you,

and I think that Mrs Still responded to that.

- [News Reader] 2,000 works by Clyfford Still

have been in storage since he died.

His will was specific about where they would go.

- To an American city that would both

create and maintain a museum

devoted exclusively to his artworks.

- [News Reader] Now Denver is that city.

After long negotiations with Stills' widow,

the collection will come here.

- It's very interesting when we got the letter,

I think it was a letter, asking if we were interested.

I mean I almost had to laugh,

because I had known his work since my Columbia days.

It's almost like we were just waiting to be asked.

There's something terrifying about this landscape,

when you take away the kind of mythos of the mountains

and look east, the scalelessness of it,

the vastness of it, right, you know.

A way of kind of holding yourself in that world,

you know holding, the building in this case,

in that world, holding those paintings in this world,

and in some way, his paintings

were trying to do the same thing.

Hold us all in the world in some way.

(cello music)

- [Diane] We had just arrived in New York

when I was a little kid.

We've taken the train.

And I had developed a very bad ear ache.

So I was asleep in the living room.

In the middle of the night I woke up

and there's my dad, in the kitchen, painting.

And that stuck with me so strongly that,

"He's doing something important."

And I was six years old.

- [Sandra] One of my worst moments

was about 18 months before he passed.

I woke up in the middle of the night

and he was just restless and unhappy.

I finally went over and sat beside him,

he was sitting on the edge of the bed,

and he's just, "Why am I doing this?

"No-one's understanding this.

"I should just go home and burn them all."

He needed to know that someone believed in him.

(cello music)

I learned not to have expectations any kind from him.

- [Diane] Yeah, I thought it was a mistake

when he left us each two paintings, two abstracts.

I didn't think he'd trust us with them.

Totally changed my life.

It freed me, yeah.

Freed me, it's gonna free my children someday,

so thank you Dad.

(gentle music)

- [Clyfford] Although several large

and significant areas of the work cannot be exhibited,

I believe what will be shown

will justify the interest and effort

you have so courageously given.

Sincerely, Clyfford Still.

("London Now" by Earl Okin)

♪ I long to be ♪

♪ In London now ♪

♪ In London now ♪

♪ The autumn's hanging in the breeze ♪

♪ I long to hear ♪

♪ On every bough ♪

♪ Starlings and sparrows ♪

♪ Sharing gossip and the trees ♪

♪ The riverside ♪

♪ At eventide ♪

♪ Will glow when day's done ♪

♪ The stars appear ♪

♪ The air is clear ♪

♪ Believe it ♪

♪ That fog's long gone from London ♪

♪ So I wish somehow ♪

♪ To be in London now ♪

(piano music)