Art, Money & Law: Notes on the Clyfford Still Estate

View of the exhibition "Clyfford Still: Paintings," 1979, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

By Ben Heller

Ten years after Still’s death, the disposition of his estate remains unresolved. Herewith some speculations on the future of this huge cache of important work.

When I expose a painting I would have it say, “Here am I; this is my presence, my feeling, myself. Here I stand implacable, proud, alive, naked, unafraid…“
—Clyfford Still, May 1951

A great joy surges through me when I work. … With tense slashes and few thrusts the beautiful white fields receive their color and the work is finished in a few minutes. … And as the blues or reds or blacks leap and quiver in their tenuous ambience or rise in austere thrusts to carry their power infinitely beyond the bounds of the limitating field, I move with them. … Only they are complete too soon, and I must quickly move on to another to keep the spirit alive and unburdened by the labor my Puritan reflexes tell me must be the cost of any joy.
—Clyfford Still, February 1956

Clyfford Still, one of the great painters of the Abstract Expressionist period, died in 1980 at the age of 75. He left an art estate whose size and character are unique in our time. The estate and the way it is being handled raise important issues which have troubled us in the past and will continue to trouble us in the future. We wonder: What are the different rights of the deceased, the heirs, and the public in that estate? What is the best way to dispose of so major an art estate?