Sidney Tillim
Sidney Tillim (born June 16, 1925 in Brooklyn , New York City , † August 16, 2001 in Manhattan , New York City) was an American artist and art critic, known for his idiosyncratic painting and independent view of modern art in post-war America . Tillim, who became known for his revival of history painting in the 1970s, switched between the figurative and the abstract throughout his career. Even though he wrote on a wide range of subjects for Artforum and Arts Magazine , he is most likely to be identified with representational art when few were doing so.
Adolescence and upbringing
Born in Brooklyn, New York in 1925, Sidney Tillim grew up in Norfolk, Virginia , where he twice won the Tidewater Marbles Championship (1938, 1939) as a young teenager. During the summer of 1946 and 1947, he reported on the Piedmont League baseball games for the Norfolk Ledger Dispatch , which also published his baseball drawings. He cited cartoonists Milton Caniff and Willard Mullin as early influencers from those years . Tillim went to Syracuse University to study journalism , but eventually switched to fine arts after a year. In 1950 he obtained a BFA (Bachelor of Fine Arts) in painting and illustration with the top grade “magna cum laude”. In college he was interested in figurative and abstract artists such as Ben Shahn , Paul Klee , Wassily Kandinsky , the Cubists and Piet Mondrian .
After graduation, Tillim went to California where he took a number of jobs while painting, writing poetry, and performing. He had his first solo exhibition in Monterey in 1952 and published a volume 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 a strong language use - if he sees dung, he names it. If his body is on fire, he says so. That is very promising. "
In 1953 Tillim returned to New York, where he should establish his career.
painting
Tillim has had over twenty solo exhibitions and has participated in many group shows throughout his career, from “22 Realists” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 to the “Whitney Annual” in 1972 to the major “Slow Art 1992: Painting in New York Now” ¡“ In MoMA PS1 and more. In 2002, a year after his death, Bennington College held a major retrospective entitled "Sidney Tillim: A Life in Pictures" (92 paintings plus drawings and graphics).
Tillim's first solo exhibition in New York took place in 1960 (geometric abstractions and figurative art). It was not until the mid-sixties that he began making large narrative paintings of personal, historical and current events, including “The Death of Malcolm X” , 1965 (unfinished); "Champion" , 1966 ("A kind of history painting ... of the psychological reality of our time .... [It's] about the secular experience and about the 'hero' of this experience, the secular man"), "Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper) ” , 1970 (a breakthrough for him, Tillim would say later when he was producing a stringent narrative for himself); "Graf Zinzendorf, frightened by Indians" , 1972 ("I use an earlier racial conflict to comment on the current one"); John Adams accepts the retainer to defend the British soldiers indicted in the 1974 Boston massacre (inspired by campus riots following the shooting in the Kent State massacre ); and "The Capture of Patty Hearst," 1978.
In the sixties and seventies Tillim was represented by the avant-garde art dealer Richard Bellamy and the Robert Schoelkopf gallery, a showcase for contemporary figurative art. It was during these years that his major narrative and representational paintings were brought to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden , Washington, DC ; "Mumok", Vienna ( Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna ) ;; acquired the Michener Art Collection at the University of Texas at Austin and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The Alberta Art Gallery acquired a series of 31 drawings for Eden Retold (a series of paintings that Tillim painted based on the poem by Karl Shapiro , Adam and Eve). Another drawing for this series - The Song , 1970 - is in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. When figurative art became interesting for the art world, Tillim, once at the forefront of the trend, returned to hard abstraction. “The idea was to just paint pictures, not make art ... [ Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime; Fair shake; Jackhammer ] are the high point of the first period (note the size of the pictures!) ... I wanted a kind of humor, but also abstract, in order to empty the claim. Making art is demanding. "
In 1979, Tillim began the transition away from “straight” figurative art in the style of Cubo Expressionism as in An American Tragedy (the writer Norman Mailer stabbed his wife at a party). His narrative work in this ephemeral style garnered some of the best reviews he was to get, while his entirely abstract work received no attention for years.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Lawrence Ferling [hetti]: "Those Days and Then the Sea by Sidney Tillim", Monterey, Calif .: Noel Young [1952], in: "Short Reviews of Some of the Recent Poetry Books", San Francisco Chronicle , 7. Sept. 1952, p. 21
- ↑ Biographical, exhibition and collection information can be found in the records of the Sidney Tillim Archive. Information on this can also be found in Sidney Tillim: Imprints & Brushworks (exhibition catalog), 1993
- ↑ Mattick: "Sidney Tillim at Usdan Gallery", Bennington College "
- ^ "Sidney Tillim's Fourth Show," Virginian Pilot, April 20, 1969, p. C27
- ↑ Kate Houskeeper, a student at Bennington College, died in a car accident on April 7, 1969
- ↑ For illustration see annual exhibition 1972 (exhibition catalog), 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 take care of the new missions in Pennsylvania. The Indians (Shawaneser) of the region (Wyoming Valley) thought he was another rapacious white man and planned to murder him. But impressed by his charismatic nature and his obvious immunity to a poisonous snake that crawled over his leg, they spared his life instead ”.
- ↑ Tillim, "Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime" (lecture)
- ↑ For illustration s. Sidney Tillim: Imprints & Brushworks (exhibition catalog), 1993, p. 6
- ^ Champion, Furniture War. For illustration see 22 Realists [exhibition catalog; s. Bibliography], 1970
- ↑ Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper). See "New Realism", in: Der Spiegel (see bibliography)
- ↑ Work Jacket on Tripod ; Fig. See Barnitz, Arts Magazine
- ^ Sink and Burlap Bag ; Fig. See Realsim Now [exhibition catalog], 1968
- ^ Letter to M. Baker, Univ. of Manitoba, 1985.
- ↑ Fig. See Tillim's essay in: Realism & Metaphor [exhibition catalog], 1980, p. 43
- ↑ Readable from the almost 20-year interval between the two New York Times reviews by Hilton Kramer: "Sidney Tillim" (in the Meredith Long Contemporary Gallery), October 26, 1979, and by Ken Johnson: "Sidney Tillim, Trans Hudson Gallery ”, April 3, 1998
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Tillim, Sidney |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American painter and art critic |
| DATE OF BIRTH | June 16, 1925 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Brooklyn , New York City , United States |
| DATE OF DEATH | August 16, 2001 |
| Place of death | Manhattan , New York City , United States |