Clyfford Still Museum

Opened In 2011 To Hold Roughly Ninety Five Per Cent Of The Entire Surviving Output Of One Abstract Expressionist Painter Some 3,100 Works Which His Will Left To Any American City Willing To Build A Museum For It And Show Nothing Else. · Denver, Colorado

Clyfford Still walked out of the commercial art world in 1951, at the point when Abstract Expressionism was about to make its painters famous, and spent the rest of his life refusing to sell, lend or exhibit on anyone's terms but his own. When he died in 1980 his will offered his entire estate to any American city that would build a museum for it alone and show no other artist in it. Nothing happened for twenty-four years. Denver took the offer in 2004 and opened this building in 2011, and the result is unique: roughly ninety-five per cent of everything Still ever made, some three thousand one hundred works, in one place, with no permanent collection to compete with it and no other name on the wall. The concrete building, by Brad Cloepfil, was designed around exactly that idea - board-formed concrete, deliberately quiet, with a perforated ceiling that filters Colorado daylight onto the canvases so the paintings change hour by hour. The Denver Art Museum is next door and the combined ticket is cheap.

1250 Bannock Street, Denver, Colorado, 80204, United States

Open most days year-round during daytime hours, typically closed one or two weekdays and on major holidays. Admission is charged and is modest; combined tickets with the Denver Art Museum next door are usually available and are the sensible buy. The museum is small enough that it is rarely crowded, and the galleries rotate regularly because the collection is far larger than the building - the works on show change, so a second visit is a different visit.

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