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, Sidney 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 '47, 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."
In 1953 Tillim returned to New York, where he would establish his career.
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).
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."