To View Clyfford Still Retrospective, Just Click

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Among the Abstract Expressionists, Clyfford Still was the un-New Yorker.

After living for a short time in Manhattan, Mr. Still, in 1961, moved to Westminster, Md., where he continued to paint bold, dramatically colored, textured canvases evoking stone precipices, jagged mountain ridges and thundering cascades. When he died in 1980 at age 75, hardly anyone had ever seen the 800 or so paintings and the 2,300-plus works on paper that the tall, cantankerous artist stored on his 22-acre farm.

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“These are not paintings in the usual sense,” Mr. Still, a Northwest Coast native, had declared; “they are life and death merging in fearful union.”

Now web users can see for themselves.

On Sept. 20, some 450 paintings from all periods of a five-decade-long career and about 1,750 drawings executed with pencil, graphite, conte crayon, ink and oil, as well as watercolors and pastels, will be published in high resolution on the website of the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver. Archival material will become accessible, too.

The unexpurgated online exhibition will reveal a fuller picture of Mr. Still’s work, with subjects ranging from log cabins, grain elevators and plow horses dating from the 1930s and quasi-Surrealist creations of the early 1940s to his later, more familiar towering abstractions.

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