The Human Touch

Many years ago in the small towns of the province of Minsk there lived a little Jewish boy who liked to draw, to make pictures. He was called Aaron. When he grew up, and realized more definitely that he had to make pictures, he attended the provincial art academy and learned what the academy and learned what the could teach him. The road to his career seemed straight, the die was cast. Then death intervened and the future didn’t seem so straight and clear and clean as it had. His father died and young Aaron was shipped off to foreign parts, westward, across Russia, across the Atlantic Ocean, and across the United States, to no other place than Sioux City, Iowa, where relatives took him in hand.

The ambition to be an artist was put aside. Young Aaron had to make a living, or part of a living, anyway. He went to work in a store, but it wasn’t a grocery store, ###? a clothing shop, or a hardware emporium, or anything of the sort. It was a jewelry shop, and that gave the young man some solace, for if he couldn’t put colors on canvas, or on paper, at least he could take delight in the vari-colored gleams of gems and gold and other precious metals and in their unusual and unutillitarian shapes. Art was laid aside and for all that he or his relatives and friends could see, forever. For ten years he was in the jewelry business, and for the latter part of that period he was the owner of a jewelry store, proof of industry and application to the task at hand.

Then came the great decision.

SOLD OUT

Aaron Stillman, as he then was, decided that although the buying and selling of jewelry was a very nice trade as trades go, it was not to be his way of life. He sold out the contents of his store and came East-to study art all over again. That was, if I recall correctly, in 1919. By day he studied at the National Academy and at night, in Abbo Ostrowsky’s class at the Educational Alliance. Moses Soyer was a fellow student. Then he went to Europe. He travelled through Spain, Italy and France, looked at and studied the Primitives, the painters and the tapestry-makers of the early Renaissance and the pre-Renaissance period. From these painters and tapestry-makers and from the Japanese print-makers he extracted the elements of his own art and sought with this knowledge to create something which would have the impress of his own emotions, his own personality. For he was determined to be an artist, not a copyist.

He went to work in no playful, dilletantish spirit. Your “La Boheme” type of artist has his cakes and ale, but Stillman was no Bohemian artist; he meant business. He rented a studio in Paris, which means simply a room with a good light and went to work to study the elements of his art. He locked his door day and night to paint and paint and paint some more. For two years he denied himself any diversions, or sociability, or relaxation. He loaded up with a supply of paints a nd canvas and devoted himself exclusively to the problem of mixing red with other colors, smearing, at times. Canvas after canvas, not for sale ###? for private experimentation, ###? not exhibiting until he had mastered his problems.

THE PROBLEMS

These included the problem of making the colors on the flat canvas suggest depth and contour, so that the objects would seem to grow out of the canvas. His problems included also the one of extracting all the wealth and the richness and the color out of a limited palette, a palette limited entirely to earth colors. Painters have marvelled at the glowing red he is able to achieve with the earth tone, whereas they have to use chemical reds. Mr. Stillman wants his pictures to last. Incidentally, he is Ary Stillman today through the circumstances that Parisian friends abbreviated his first name to Ary, and when he gave his first exhibition in Paris he exhibited as Ary Stillman and as such he has remained to this day. That first name, incidentally, sounds like Hebrew for lion, but although Mr. Stillman is tenacious and singleminded, he is no lion in manner.

For twelve years he lived, studied and toiled abroad, until he had achieved an approximation to his goal, which was to transfer onto canvas the personal vision of Ary Stillman in the personal technique to which he had struggled, but informed with the knowledge he had gained from the study of those master of the past to whom he had spiritual kinship. When he was ready he exhibited and, during the good years, he sold. His paintings were hung in group shows sponsored by the leading spirits of French art and letters, and after his one-man show at the Zak gallery critics almost strove with each other to give praise to Stiliman, and were one unable to admire his paintings one might conclude that Stillman was the pet of a coterie. In a volume devoted to Parisian sculptors and painters, “Tetes de Montparnasse,” by Nesto Jacometti, Stillman is the only American represented.

And in the chapter devoted to him, the writer represents Stillman as the inheritor of the Sienese tradition, for we read that in his portraits of women Stillman conveys the expression of nobility and serenity which the painters of Sienna gave to their Madonnas. The writer tells us also that there is peace and music in his canvas and, among the modernists, the one reproach against Stillman is that he verges on sweetness, which, in other quarters, might be no reproach. But being an honest man and recognizing this tendency, he seeks to guard against it. On the walls of his barely furnished, helter-skelter studio, he has nailed up, beneath the colored reproductions of the dream-like tapestries he loves to look at, a rotogravure reproduction of a Velasquez painting depicting three faces of lower class types-the chief touch of rough realism on Stillman’s studio walls.

GEMS AND CONCRETE

For he is back in New York. His return was announced through an exhibition of his paintings at the Midtown Gallery, where one could see exposed the particular facet of his talent-to use only a modest word. I realized as I looked at these pictures that here was a fresh talent and as I looked I felt that this Stillman painted as if he had crushed gems into concrete and put that strange, though solid, mixture on his canvas in lieu of paint. It was only later that I learned he had been in the jewelry business and later also that I heard him tell what pleasure it sometimes gave him to hold a handful of shimmering gems in his palm, and later that he pointed out to me a remark made by a French reviewer: “Stillman makes me think of tapestries and precious jewels.”

At the Midtown Gallery exhibition there were only nineteen pictures-not a large exhibition, but one so choice that I spent no less than an hour in admiration. It was an exhibition to take joy in, without in the least knowing or caring about technical problems solved or unsolved. Perhaps Mr. Stillman’s exposition of the things he had sought to do intensified that appreciation, but did not create it. And although it was a delight, it was only a delight secondary to that which his pictures gave, to see his own eyes sparkle with animation as he described the painting, In the Studio,-it will be shown at Chicago when the World’s Fair reopens-or as he traced for me the progress of his struggle to create something satisfying with paint and canvas and vision. For him nothing else matters.