page_title: Sidney Tillim
section_title: Painting
hierarchical_section_title: Sidney Tillim / Painting
caption_attribution_description: English: Divided Loyalties, c.1991, acrylic imprinted on canvas, 64" x 77"
context_page_description: Sidney Tillim 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.
context_section_description: 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).
  Tillim's first solo show in New York took place in 1960 (geometric abstractions and representational art).  It wasn't until the mid-sixties 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."); 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."); Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper), 1970 (a breakthrough for him, Tillim would say later, in producing a narrative with conviction); Count Zinzendorf Spared by the Indians, 1972 ("I am using an earlier 'race' conflict to comment on the present one."); 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); and The Capture of Patty Hearst, 1978.
  In the sixties and seventies 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.;  Mumok, Vienna (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien); the James A. Michener collection at the University of Texas; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro. 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").  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."
  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).  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.  (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 sixties and seventies; 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 postmoderni
caption: Divided Loyalties, c.1991, acrylic imprinted on canvas, 64" x 77"
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