Because of the limits imposed upon the Clyfford Still Museum by its charter — it can only show works by the late abstract expressionist painter, and there are only so many of those in existence — producing a new exhibition there can be like orchestrating a game of poker.
Curators shuffle the deck, deal their hand, and hope to come up with a winner.
This rule, which the city of Denver agreed to in 2004 when it accepted ownership of the art and promised to build a museum to display it, has inspired all sorts of rearrangements of the 830 paintings in the collection over the years. Shows have been built around everything from the chronology of Still’s output to his preferred choices of color.
Sometimes these efforts have come off as scholarly filters meant to deepen the understanding of this mysterious artist and the wild and exciting objects he made during a half-century of creating. Sometimes they seem like gimmicks, desperate moves engineered to keep people coming through the doors to look at things they have seen before.
The current exhibition, titled “Awful Bigness,” has a lot going for it, and it serves as a valid incentive to visit the museum, especially for folks who may not have been there for a while. Primarily because it is a lively and light-hearted show at an institution that has taken itself very seriously at times.
The Still — a quiet concrete box of a museum with an austere aura — can feel like a temple. That’s not a putdown on the architecture. Designer Brad Cloepfil’s building remains one of the best structures in the city.
But it is a solemn place by nature, and not even the cheery staff that welcomes people at the door can erase its innate weightiness, a personality heightened by the challenging work on its walls. Even advanced art scholars wrestle to understand Still’s jagged fields of color; the general public struggles mightily.
But “Big” is an easy concept, and it is fully legitimate, not at all a marketing trick. Still loved a massive canvas –a 12-footer was just right for the things he wanted to express — and so there is no stretch.
The paintings in the show are among his largest. Each feels monumental, and can tower over visitors. There are maybe 20 in the entire display and they are sizable enough that only four fit in most of the rooms.
“Awful Bigness” feels luxurious in that way, thanks to the editing of curator Bailey Placzek, who collaborated with museum director Joyce Tsai. The pair know the work and they understand its power — a little bit of Clyfford Still goes a long way.
And so it is easy to take a seat on a bench and spend some time with these works as individuals rather than as a group and give them the respect they command.
What was Still thinking in 1956 when he created the painting catalogued as “PH-1077” — an object more than 12 feet wide and 9 feel tall — applying a spiky field of blue oil paint across the bottom two-thirds of the canvas and topping it off with a splash of bright red near the top?
What did he want us to see in the work “PH-897” — more than 13 feet tall — with a pool of orange down its center, surrounded on either side by vertical swaths of black, yellow, blue and red?
This exhibit invites viewers to relax and contemplate the possibilities.
The curators, in the exhibition text, posit this oversized gazing experience as natural for audiences in the Western part of the U.S. Citizens here are accustomed to looking at massive vistas, a fringe benefit of living in a place where the land rises and falls framing majestic views.
Still saw it that way himself, at least part of the time. The show takes its title from his quote describing the vastness of the plains and hills of the region where he spent much of his life, and the “awful bigness of the land, the men and the machines” that characterize it.
It is never certain, of course, which aspect of this thinking Still was actually painting. He was a master of the poker face who talked little about his subjects and never gave his creations actual titles that might offer a clue. The curators provide some guidance, breaking the exhibit down into categories, such as “Landscape,” “Impact” and “Wonder.”
But unlike other exhibits at the museum, which have attempted to put this artist in social, technical or historical context, “Awful Bigness” seems content to let visitors focus mainly on the simple act of looking. There is very limited labeling on the walls; viewers are largely on their own with difficult material.
That might be frustrating for those who want to understand better the subject matter, to decipher Still’s codes of rough lines and blotchy pools of color, and to make these paintings look like … something. But it is simultaneously an invitation to relax and not try so hard and to appreciate the volumes of emotions that can come from big art.
As a painter, Still understood it, especially later in his career, and he went all in. He was content very often to simply stretch a canvas to its maximum and respect the organic power of heft, so much so that he left larger and larger portions of his canvases flagrantly unpainted.
The exhibit has a terrific example of this mindset in 1964’s “PH-439,” in which Still was satisfied to put only a douse of white and minor specks of orange and yellow on a canvas the size of a highway billboard — and to call it done. It is, perhaps, the most surprising and impressive work in the show. If this exhibit is a round of cards, “PH-439” is its ace in the hole.
“But “Awful Bigness” is full of moments like that, and, because of its easy concept, it lowers the stakes of a visit rather than raising them. I’m not sure if it’s a royal flush, but it surely reveals a strong hand.
IF YOU GO
“Awful Bigness” continues through Sept. 10. Location: 1250 Bannock St. Info: 720-354-4880 or clyffordstillmuseum.org.
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