Sidney Tillim (June 16, 1925 – August 16, 2001) was an American artist and art critic, known for his maverick painting and independent point of view on modern art in post-war America. Best remembered for his revival of history painting in the 1970s, Tillim alternated between the figurative and the abstract throughout his career. Likewise, although he wrote on a wide range of topics for Artforum and Arts Magazine, he is most identified with supporting representational art when few did.
Early life and education
Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1925, Tillim grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, where, as a young teenager, he twice won the Tidewater Marbles Championship (1938, 1939). During the summers of 1946 and 1947, he covered Piedmont League baseball for the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, which also published his baseball drawings. (He claimed the cartoonists Milton Caniff and Willard Mullin as early influences.) Tillim went to Syracuse University to study journalism, only to switch to fine arts after a year. He earned a BFA in painting and illustration, magna cum laude, in 1950. In college he became interested in representational and abstract artists: Ben Shahn, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, the Cubists, and Piet Mondrian (especially in Mondrian's grids).
After graduation, Tillim headed to California where he took a series of jobs as he painted, wrote poetry, and acted. In Monterey in 1952 he had his first solo show (abstractions) and published a chapbook of poetry, about which the Beat Generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote: "Here is a small collection of a painter's poetry.... He is not afraid to use strong language—if he sees dung, he names it. If his body is on fire, he says so. This is promising."Lawrence Ferling[hetti], Those Days and Then the Sea by Sidney Tillim, Monterey, Calif.: Noel Young , in: "Short Reviews of Some of the Recent Poetry Books," San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1952, p. 21.
In 1953 Tillim returned to New York, where he would establish his career.Biographical, exhibition, and collection information is found in the records of the Sidney Tillim Archive. Information can also be found in the back matter of Sidney Tillim, Imprints & Brushworks [exhibition catalogue], 1993.
Painting
Tillim had over twenty solo exhibitions and took part in many group shows throughout his career, from 22 Realists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 and the 1972 Whitney Annual to the big 1992 Slow Art: Painting in New York Now at MoMA PS1, and more. In 2002, a year after he died, Bennington College held a major retrospective exhibition, Sidney Tillim: A Life in Pictures (92 paintings, plus drawings and graphics).Mattick, "Sidney Tillim at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College."
Tillim's first solo show in New York took place in 1960 (geometric abstractions and representational art).Judd, "Sidney Tillim at Cober." It was not until the mid-1960s that he began large narrative paintings of personal, historical, and current events, among them The Death of Malcolm X, 1965 (unfinished); Champion, 1966 ("It’s me," Tillim said of the knuckles-down marble shooter, "conceiving we are the heroes of our own existence."Tillim, “Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime" [lecture].); A Dream of Being, 1969 ("A kind of history painting...of the psychological reality of our time....[It is] about the secular experience and the 'hero' of that experience—secular man.""Sidney Tillim's Fourth Show," Virginian-Pilot, April 20, 1969, p. C27. For illustration, see Burton, Art News.); Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper), 1970 (a breakthrough for him, Tillim would say later, in producing a narrative with conviction);For illustration, see Davis, Newsweek. (The painting is partially visible in the photograph in the Infobox of this article.) Kate Houskeeper, a Bennington College sophomore, died in a car crash, April 7, 1969. Count Zinzendorf Spared by the Indians, 1972 ("I am using an earlier 'race' conflict to comment on the present one.");For illustration, see 1972 Annual Exhibition [exhibition catalogue], Whitney Museum. Entry 119 reads: "Nicolaus Ludwig Zinzendorf, Count of Zinzendorf and Pottendorf (1700-1760), founder of the Moravian missionary order, visited America in 1742 to look after the new missions in Pennsylvania. Thinking him another rapacious white man, the Indians (Shawanese) of the region (Wyoming Valley) plotted to murder him. But impressed by his charismatic manner and his apparent immunity to a poisonous snake, which crawled over his leg, they spared his life instead." John Adams Accepts the Retainer to Defend the British Soldiers Accused in the Boston Massacre, 1974 (inspired by campus uprisings following the Kent State shootings);Tillim, "Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime" [lecture]. and The Capture of Patty Hearst, 1978.For illustration, see Sidney Tillim, Imprints & Brushworks [exhibition catalogue], 1993, p. 6.
In the 1960s and 1970s Tillim was represented by the avant-garde art dealer Richard Bellamy and by the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, a showcase for contemporary figurative art. During these years his important narrative and representational paintings were acquired for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.;Champion, Furniture War. For illustration of the latter painting, see 22 Realists [exhibition catalogue], 1970. Mumok, Vienna (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien);Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper). See also "Neuer Realismus," Der Spiegel. the James A. Michener collection at the University of Texas;Work Jacket on Tripod. For illustration, see Barnitz, Arts Magazine. and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro.Sink and Burlap Bag. For illustration, see Realsim Now [exhibition catalogue], 1968. The Art Gallery of Alberta acquired a suite of thirty-one drawings for Eden Retold (a series of paintings which Tillim based on the poem by Karl Shapiro, "Adam and Eve").For illustrations, see Drawings by Sidney Tillim [exhibition catalogue], 1976. Another drawing for this series—The Song, 1970—is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
By the time figurative art became of interest in the art world, however, Tillim, once at the forefront of the trend, had returned to hard-edge abstraction. "The idea was just to paint pictures, not to make art.... [Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime, Fair Shake, Jackhammer] are the climax of the first period (note the sizes of the pictures).... I intended a kind of humor though, even in the abstract, to deflate pretension. To make art is pretentious."Letter to M. Baker, Univ. of Manitoba, 1985.
Tillim began the transition away from "straight" figurative art in 1979 by way of a Cubo-Expressionist style, as in An American Tragedy (the novelist Norman Mailer stabbing his wife at a party).For illustration, see Tillim, Essay, in: Realism & Metaphor [exhibition catalogue], 1980, p. 43. For illustration of an additional work in this style, see Perl, Exhibition review. His narrative work in this short-lived style elicited some of the best reviews he would receive; while his totally abstract work would attract no attention for years.Note, for example, the nearly twenty-year interval between New York Times reviews: Hilton Kramer, "Sidney Tillim" (at Meredith Long Contemporary), October 26, 1979; and Ken Johnson, "Sidney Tillim, Trans Hudson Gallery," April 3, 1998. (In some quarters of the figurative revival, this embrace of abstraction would earn him life-long enmity.) As a consequence, in the mid-1980s when there were no commercial showings of this work, Tillim was challenged multiple times by the Internal Revenue Service on his claim to the profession "artist" (vs "teacher/ critic," with "artist" relegated to the category of hobby). Tillim prevailed in every audit.
Tillim's representational art had developed in the socially and politically unstable 1960s and 1970s; while his experiments in abstract art occurred at the time conservatism took hold in the eighties and nineties. It was in 1987 that he accidentally kicked over a can of paint in his studio and proceeded to soak up the spill off the floor with a roll of paper towels. The saturated toweling inspired him to imprint the sheets directly onto the canvas. He had stumbled upon a process that made concrete his ideas about reproduction, repetition, fabrication, and postmodernist art.For explication of these ideas, see Tillim, Essay, in: Photography Reproduction Production [exhibition catalogue], 1992. The imprints are large and colorful, energetic and elegantGenocchio, Exhibition review.—qualities that had been held in check by the labor of history painting (which could take months and in one instance, Tillim admitted, took yearsTillim, "Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime" [lecture].).
In 1992 Tillim started rubbing opaquing film (Korectype) on paper, scraping the film with his fingernails, brushes, scissors, etc. "Korectype appeals to me as a medium because it is both mechanical and manual at once. With it one makes a mark that is personal and impersonal—surprising and finished, a unique copy in fact."Sidney Tillim, Artist statement, in: At Hand: New Methods, New Materials [exhibition announcement], Payne Gallery, Moravian College, 2000. Illus. three Korectypes. For illustration of an additional work in this medium, see Sidney Tillim, Imprints & Brushworks [exhibition catalogue], 1993, p. 11.
Then in 1993, feeling he had taken these experiments as far as he could, Tillim resumed painting with brushes.In 1993, for Tillim's second solo exhibition in Germany, Galerie Vorsetzen, Hamburg, produced a beautiful catalogue with eleven color plates of the imprints and five of the new brushworks, Sidney Tillim, Imprints & Brushworks 1989-1993. The brushworks are large abstract compositions, loose grids of shapes of dripping color that, as intimated in the title Approaching Majesty, Accepting Shame, are simultaneously "magnificent" and "disenchanted." This new work took Tillim away from issues of perception and mechanical reproduction, inherent in the imprints, and brought him back to "painting about painting."Schwabsky, On Sidney Tillim, et al.
In his late period Tillim returned to narrative art, with images from popular culture—viz., movies, television, current events. These include American Beauty, David Cone's No-Hitter, Modern Crime, or The Death of Irene Silverman (by Sante Kimes), The Women (the rapper Foxy Brown and the model Kate Moss), and others.For illustrations, see Sidney Tillim Recent Paintings [exhibition catalogue], 2001.
What unites all his work is the postmodern combination of a deep affinity for ordinary American culture and colors with the traditions of art. These could range from the stiff elegance and frozen detachment of the Italian Primitives whom Tillim admired—Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini—to the struggle and ambition of Cézanne. "Banality represented under the proper art historical, stylistic conditions is the only credible source of art beauty in late twentieth-century art," avowed Tillim. "If there's not an element of the banal, of the ordinary, even the 'kitschy,' it's not for me."Tillim, "Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime" [lecture].
Tillim's last exhibition was eight 'banal,' 'ordinary,' 'even kitschy,' contemporary history paintings. The show, Sidney Tillim Recent Paintings, took place in 2001, four months before the artist died, making it perforce—much as is the painting Johnny Guitar, or To Stay or To Go—his "poignant moment of leave taking."Johnson, Exhibition review.
In painting Tillim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Yaddo Fellowship, and Ingram Merrill Foundation for the Arts Grant. In Summer 1992 he was a Resident Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.
Art criticism