Clyfford Still valuation
Abstract Expressionist who walked away from the galleries and left his work to a city that would build a museum for it.
Clyfford Still was born at Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904 and grew up in Spokane, Washington, and on a farm at Bow Island, Alberta.
What a work by Clyfford Still is worth
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Bio
Clyfford Still was born at Grandin, North Dakota, in 1904 and grew up in Spokane, Washington, and on a farm at Bow Island, Alberta. He went briefly to the Art Students League in New York in 1925. His painting moved from figuration to abstraction between 1938 and 1942, and in 1943 the San Francisco Museum of Art gave him his first solo exhibition. Mark Rothko introduced him to Peggy Guggenheim, who showed him at Art of This Century in 1946. He taught at the California School of Fine Arts from 1946 to 1950 and then lived in New York, where he broke with commercial galleries and declined exhibitions from 1952. In 1961 he moved to a farm near Westminster, Maryland. He died in 1980.
Still kept most of what he painted. His will left the works still in his hands to an American city that would build a museum for them alone and never sell them; his widow, Patricia, chose Denver, and the Clyfford Still Museum opened there in 2011. He had already given large groups of paintings to the Albright-Knox in Buffalo and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, so few works are in private hands. Titles are mostly letters and dates, such as 1949-A-No. 1, or inventory numbers such as PH-1033, and these, with exhibition history, are how a work is identified.
Art of This Century, Metart and Denver
At the California School of Fine Arts he encouraged students to open their own gallery, Metart, which was short-lived. His first full retrospective was at the Albright-Knox in 1959.
The American Academy of Arts and Letters gave him its Award of Merit in 1972 and elected him a member in 1978, and he received the Skowhegan Medal in 1975. The Denver museum also holds his archive: sketchbooks, journals and his library.
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