Billion-dollar legacy

Steven Henry Madoff visits the trove of more than 2000 works by abstract expressionist Clyfford Still, until now in storage as part of his estate, and planned for a new museum to open in Denver in 2010.

[Clyfford] Still once wrote that painting was a way to find revelation and to “exalt the spirit of man.” Yet it is clear how personal the struggle was. [Henry T. Hopkins, a former director of what is now the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art], recalled an anecdote the painter once told him. “When Still was a small child in Canada, they were digging a well, and they needed someone to go down into it to see the condition of the pit,” he said. “They put a rope around his ankle and dropped him down head first.

“He told me he was terrified, but there was the rope. And I always wondered if those streaks in his paintings, which he called his lifelines, had something to do with that experience. The line there to pull him back up.”