Dean Sobel, Clyfford Still Museum's founding director, to step down
Dean Sobel, the founding director and guiding force of Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum, will leave his position in the fall, the institution announced Thursday.
Sobel has served as the museum’s only top executive, taking the helm when the city-owned attraction opened its doors in November 2011 and shepherding it through more than 50 separate exhibitions and rearrangements of paintings and drawings by its marquee artist, the abstract expressionist pioneer who many consider one of the most important American painters of the 20th century.
Sobel will stay at the museum for five months, then move to a new job as a professor of art history and museum studies at the University of Denver.
The offer of a high-quality teaching gig and the fact that the museum recently completed “phase one” of its mission by cataloging all of the 3,400 paintings and drawings in its collection signaled it was time to move on, Sobel said.
“It does feel like the time to step aside and let someone with new and different ideas lead,” he said.
Sobel’s role at the Still museum was unprecedented. He actually came on board the operation in 2005, just after the city agreed to serve as the repository of the artist’s work, which was a gift from his widow, Patricia Still. The artist, who died in 1980 at the age of 75, was notorious for keeping his output close at hand, choosing to keep nearly all of it in his personal possession, even though it might have sold for hundreds of millions on the art market.
Conditions attached to the donation were unique. First, the city had to agree to build a facility to house the works, and Sobel oversaw the selection of Brad Cloepfil and Allied Works Architecture as the creator of the concrete structure at 13th Avenue and Bannock Street that would go on to become, perhaps, the city’s most highly regarded piece of design.
Then, Sobel had to figure out a novel way of running a museum whose operations were severely limited by a number of quirks outlined in the donation agreement, which banned the exhibition of any other artist in the building, hampered loans of Still’s work to peer institutions, and prevented the museum from having a restaurant, gift shop or auditorium, amenities that other art galleries rely on to expand programming and raise funds.
Sobel also oversaw the museum’s controversial sale of four paintings at auction just before it opened. The deal exploited a loophole in the museum’s operating conditions and not everyone agreed with it, but it raised $114 million for an endowment. Few museums of its size, anywhere in the world, have such a significant endowment to draw upon when offsetting expenses.
Over the years, the Still’s curatorial team developed seemingly endless ways of showcasing different aspects of his work, all meant to keep things interesting and inspire repeat visitors. Exhibitions were arranged by things like color, chronology or subject matter. Well-known artists like Julian Schnabel, Mark Mothersbaugh and Mark Bradford were imported to select paintings for special events.
One show compared Still’s works to those of Vincent van Gogh, with van Gogh’s work appearing only on hand-held digital tablets, keeping the museum in line with its rule of only presenting Still’s own output.
The museum also developed programming outside of its walls, pushing the boundaries of its mandate. In 2016, it loaned nine masterworks to an abstract expressionism survey staged at the Royal Academy in London and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. More than 650,000 people saw the pieces there; the Clyfford Still Museum gets roughly 50,000 visitors a year in Denver.
That may be a small number of eyeballs in the museum world, but the presence of the single-artist museum of such renown helped put Denver on the international culture map. The Still has become a destination for art lovers near and far.
As for filling its other directive of introducing a painter who is placed in the highest echelon of art by critics and scholars but is lesser-known to the general public, Sobel believes the museum has made progress.
Conversations about 20th-century abstraction continue to center around the big three: Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning. Still, who many believe was just as good — or better — remains in the second tier.
“He still isn’t the first name that comes out of your mouth,” said Sobel, who is content to let his replacement continue the mission he started.
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