Patricia Still, who was instrumental in Denver becoming home to more than 2,000 works by her late husband, respected abstract-expressionist Clyfford Still, died Sunday at the Carroll Hospital Center in Westminster, Md. She was 85.
After years of searching for a home for her husband’s estate and realizing that time was running out, she agreed to give 750 paintings and more than 1,400 works on paper to the city on the condition it build and maintain a museum for them.
“The city of Denver – and really the art world – owes her gratitude for selecting a city and seeing to it that these works will finally be seen and considered,” said Dean Sobel, project director for the planned Still museum. “Her role in that cannot be underestimated.”
After Clyfford Still died in 1980, Patricia Still oversaw the estate, devoting much of her time to choosing among the cities competing for her husband’s works, some of which have been never been shown publicly.
“She was in many respects the face of the artist between the time of the artist’s passing and now her passing,” Sobel said.
Clyfford Still was a pivotal figure in the development of abstract expressionism along with such figures as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. The movement emerged in the 1940s and ’50s, shifting the art world epicenter from Paris to New York.
Though always respected within the art world, the painter never gained the broader fame of many of his peers. He was something of a curmudgeon and disliked critics, curators and collectors.
Patricia, a native of Ione, Wash., met Clyfford Still in the late 1930s, when he was teaching at Washington State College in Pullman, where she was a student. She became his second wife in the mid-1950s, and the couple moved to Westminster, Md., in 1961 and to New Windsor, Md., in the mid-1960s.
Among her survivors are her nephew, Curt Freed of Denver, who helped facilitate the estate coming to Denver, and two stepdaughters, Diane Still Knox and Sandra Still Campbell, who have become co-personal representatives of the estate.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-820-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.