Jewish Herald-Voice (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 22, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 4, 2008 Page: 2 of 20
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Page 2
Jewish Herald-Voice
September 4, 2008
Stlllm&n From Page 1
the idea of unconscious expression,
especially Jung’s archetypes or what
he called the ‘collective unconscious.’
This expresses itself in some code.
Stillman found this code in some
sense in the Mayan hieroglyphs,
which he understood as an early
language. There is a surrealist basis
for this, what Breton called an
observed and internal reality. It’s
a surreal language with traces of
familiar language. Breton and other
surrealists went back to pictographs
and Egyptian hieroglyphs, getting
away from representation.
“The shapes, form and colors are
in interplay. With Stillman, it’s part
of a larger context of the interest in
primitivism. It’s amazing how many
artists and theorists were interested
in primitivism. The Jewish side comes
in with a connection to Kabbalah. The
lettering of the Hebrew language is
archaic. That’s the jump that [Stillman]
makes from the Jewish side to his
abstract side. He knew all this stuff
and it filters in, but not explicitly. To my
mind, looking carefully at his works,
he has this sort of Hebrew-Mayan-
Ary Stillman at a 1964 exhibition at
University of Houston.
pictographic idea that converges
into a picture writing that turns into
gestures. In Stillman’s case, there’s
the Mayan gestural script informed
by a Kabbalistic consciousness of
the Hebrew alphabet. There’s a kind
of Jewish mysticism behind these
interesting visual shapes.”
Art historians tell us that abstract
art emerged as the dominant form of
American painting in the late 1940s,
supplanting the realist movement of
Wife of Israel Nachman Brodkey, 1908,
oil on canvas
regionalism and bringing New York to
the center of the art world. Stillman
had been painting in an Impressionist
style. Between 1945 and 1946, Stillman
abandoned this style, technique and
subject matter for a “second career”
as an abstract painter. Stillman’s
abstract work went through several
phases, beginning with a style that
was heavily influenced by Wassily
Kandinsky’s works.
Houstonian Fredell Lack
Ethiopia
were called
In Israel we were call
A bptcNtl Film L>wee*vti<j F>voF
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W/rths, Pirttbr W Aj/V
Liv© and Becom©
Community Full Film Screening Event $25
Sunday, September 14, 2008 at 2 pm
Young Adult Exclusive Event $20
Monday, September 15, 2008 at 7 pm
Rice University Media Center - Entrance 8
For tickets please call: 713.729.7000 ext. 31
Free Admission with Rice Student
Complimentary Parking in West Lot 5?
Sponsored by:
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___
Stillman
dessine par Lui-meme
Self portrait (dessine par lui-meme),
1927, ink on paper
Eichhorn remembers Stillman as “the
glamorous uncle who went to Europe
all the time.” She said, “I watched
him paint in his studio many times
when we lived in New York. He always
used a palette knife to lay the paints
on, never a brush. Ary was very
influenced by French painters. And,
he was in that group that lived and
worked in Paris in the 1920s and ’30s.
Pie laid the paint on in dabs and when
you get close to the paintings, you can
see they weren’t smooth strokes. He
was an Impressionist painter in his
early years.
“After Hitler, he felt the world had
changed. He said to me, ‘You know,
the world is not the same. We cannot
paint our impressions. We have to
paint our inner feelings.’
“He couldn’t paint surface realities
anymore. I understood he was now
painting about what he felt inside. I
gradually came to understand what
he was saying.”
How could Stillman not have been
deeply affected by the Holocaust?
Born in a predominantly Jewish
village in the province of Minsk in the
Pale of Settlement, Stillman’s family
moved to Slutsk after his father died.
After he entered a secular1 school in
Slutsk, the school director recognized
Stillman’s abilities as a draftsman and
arranged for the youngster to apply to
the Academy of Fine Arts at Vilna.
After two years in Vilna, Stillman
decided to immigrate to the United
States, following the 1905 pogroms in
the Pale. Stillman resumed his life as
an artist, studying at night at the Art
Students League in New York City.
But, Europe was the center of the art
world at the time. Stillman moved to
Paris in 1920. He moved back to New
York in 1933, months after Hitler took
over power in Germany. Stillman had
a highly developed understanding of
politics from a leftist perspective. And,
he personally understood, as a Russian
Jew, that Hitler’s ideas on nationalism
and race enjoyed a wide approval
among European intellectuals and
artists in the early 1930s.
For Stillman, immediately after
the Holocaust, the central question
was how to reconcile his Jewish
consciousness with his art. Could art
convey what was happening to human
beings in an inhuman world? Abstract
art appeared to be the best path to
reconcile a spirituality that could be,
for Stillman, “abstractly envisaged but
never securely represented.”
Valerie Olsen, associate director
of the Glassell School of Art of the
See Stillman on Page 3
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Samuels, Jeanne F. Jewish Herald-Voice (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 100, No. 22, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 4, 2008, newspaper, September 4, 2008; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth544212/m1/2/?rotate=90: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; .