page_title: William Tillyer
section_title: The Kachina paintings
hierarchical_section_title: William Tillyer / The Kachina paintings
caption_attribution_description: English: William Tillyer, Blue Ogre (1994)
context_page_description: William Tillyer is an English artist. His work has been shown frequently in the UK and internationally since the late 1950s. There are at least 15 works by Tillyer in the Tate collection, including High Force. Examples of his work are also included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Brooklyn Art Museum, the Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas, the Smith College Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
context_section_description: In the autumn of 1994 Tillyer showed his next series, the Kachina paintings, at André Emmerich's gallery in New York. The catalogue appends a Tillyer text, 'some Brief Notes'; the introduction is by Martin Gayford. In it, Tillyer writes about the Italian Renaissance as, for all its positive achievements, a deleterious episode in the long history of art: "The Kachina paintings... may also be seen as a visual essay on the relation of illusion to reality... of the Renaissance ideal of spatial illusionism to the Byzantine concept of the object. The failure in the 15th century to couple the new Renaissance concepts of perspective and illusionistic space with those of Byzantium made for a lost opportunity. It is only in the 20th century that this failure has begun to be redressed." For the art historian this raises all sorts of difficulties, but the underling truth in what Tillyer outlines was known to the great innovators of Modern art, to Gauguin and Cézanne especially, as is shown by their efforts to abandon not only academic illusionism but also the illusionism of tone and colour still purveyed by Impressionism, in favour of a new flatness and formal, as opposed to naturalistic, rightness; also known to Matisse, Kandinsky, Malevich etc., who gave priority to the demands of the pictorial object and of their media. The Cubism of Picasso and Braque was, among other things, a dialectical treatment of the opposition to which Tillyer refers. And surely by at the very latest 1950, roughly the time when Matisse made his great paper cut-out compositions, and Pollock his finest drip works, the Albertian tradition of the tabula quadrata as a window on to reality had been set aside, countered by something equally powerful. Tilyer, however, takes this rejection further still. It is one thing for Pollock to substitute for perspective and tonal modelling the material reality of paint and colour and the brushstroke as visual fact. It is quite another to change the language of painting altogether, fracturing its traditional logic by introducing other, conventionally incongruous media, as in Tillyer's substitution of the canvas for a wire lattice in his earlier Mesh works.
  The Kachina paintings likewise make reference to unconventional media: the kachina dolls made by the Native America Hopi tribe. The kachina doll, writes Tillyer in the catalogue, is "icon-like," and provided him "with a vehicle to explore the dialogue between nature seen romantically and the geometry of man-made forms" to which the series (and much of his earlier work) makes reference. Kachna dolls are at once figurative and geometrical; in them "gesture counters geometry."  The forms of the paintings are themselves taken from the dolls, most obviously the blue ratchet-edged insectile biomorph that in Blue Ogre (1994) appears to devour the green and yellow comma-like gestures around which it curves. Though almost every painting in the series is vertical and many of them present dominant forms – "gestures" – of this sort, the artist has remarked: "They are all landscapes. All the paintings are kachinas, but most could just as well be given the title Landscape with Ruins." This refers to Tillyer's use of the type of landscape inherited from, primarily, Poussin. In the Westwood and Living in Arcadia paintings, we saw him knotting and fusing his pictorial signs for nature into quite concise clusters, operating as emblems more than as glimpses of landscape. Now he uses parts and aspects of the dolls in addition to Poussin's geometric and stereometric forms in his internal debate on the nature of art. This becomes more assertive than before, more up-front, less implicit. It is partly that the images themselves are so insistent. Big forms, on the surface as paint, run swiftly from top to bottom, sometimes organic and gestural, or else hard and geometric, flat and voluminous, relief and planar. They attempt to deal with the artist's strongly felt ideas about landscape and the nature of painting: of the eternal struggle between artifice and reality implicit in the creation, consum
caption: William Tillyer, Blue Ogre, 1994
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