Ary Stillman

Ary Stillman was born in Hresk in the Minsk province of Belarus, Russia on February 13, 1891. He studied art in Vilna until 1907, when he emigrated to the United States because of the failed 1905 revolution that sent Lenin into exile. He joined his brother and cousins who were already living in Sioux City. He worked at a jewelry shop to support his family and spent his nights painting. In 1919 he returned to New York to study painting at the National Academy of Design and the Art Student’s League with John Sloan; in 1921 he moved to Paris and studied in André Lhote’s Académie Montparnasse. He soon earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his atmospheric landscapes, as well as his elegant portraits of women.

Stillman spent the first half of his career as a successful realist, painting pictures in a loose, impressionistic style. In 1933, Stillman returned to New York painting the familiar landmarks of the city. He worked for the easel division of the WPA Federal Art Project, and became a member of the American Artists’ Congress.

In the 1940s the center of the Modernist avant-garde moved from Paris to New York, and by 1946 Stillman had completely abandoned his representational style in response to the horrors of WWII. He explained his shift by saying, “The world of surface realities is no longer paintable, for nothing is as it formerly seemed.” His earliest abstract works were influenced by Vassily Kandinsky. He was part of the same group of painters who would become the Abstract Expressionists in the 1950s, and was a friend of the painter Arshile Gorky.

Like many of his contemporaries, Stillman was experimenting with Surrealist techniques for making images with only limited conscious control over the result. In the summer of 1948 he stayed at the Cape Cod Massachusetts artists’ colony of Provincetown. While there, he invented a unique drawing process: using an inkless pen, or some such tool, he drew on a sheet of paper, making invisible scribbles, which only emerged as white lines when he rubbed a flat stick of charcoal or pastel across the surface.

During the rise of the New York School, Stillman exhibited regularly at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery on Manhattan’s 57th Street and with the Provincetown Art Association. His health began to fail in 1950, and Stillman severed his affiliations with his gallery and the New York art world; traveled to Paris, then Spain, and ultimately settled in Mexico in 1957. He spent the final ten years of his life traveling between Cuernavaca and Houston, Texas, where he received medical treatment.