Ary Stillman, NYC School Abstract Expressionist Russian-American Painter Pastel Drawing

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Abstract Artwork (drawing or rubbing) laid on a New Years card.

Provenance: Virginia Field, Arts administrator; New York, N.Y. Assistant … Read more Abstract Artwork (drawing or rubbing) laid on a New Years card.

Provenance: Virginia Field, Arts administrator; New York, N.Y. Assistant director for Asia House gallery. (she was friends with John von Wicht, Ben Zion and Andy Warhol)


During the summer of 1948 in the Cape Cod Massachusetts artists’ colony of Provincetown, Stillman’s experiments with such techniques led to a unique drawing process. Using an inkless pen, or some such tool, the artist impressed the paper with invisible scribbles, which only emerged as white lines when he rubbed a flat stick of charcoal or pastel across the surface. These evocative, subtly modulated, works on paper are sophisticated, yet little known, examples of Abstract Expressionist art. He imbued his abstractions with a glowing atmospheric quality that derives from both impressionism and the Old Testament concept of divine light. He subsequently adapted this technique to the graphic arts, experimenting in the early 1950s with color lithograph and woodcut print techniques.

Ary Stillman (February 13, 1891 – January 28, 1967) was a representational and abstract expressionist Russian-American painter born in Czarist Russia in Hretzk, near Slutsk, Belarus. He excelled in art as a youth, and after graduating from school he was accepted into the Imperial School of Art in Vilna. Stillman immigrated to the United States after less than two years at the Imperial School, landing in Sioux City, Iowa at the age of 16. He worked in a local jewelry store to pay the bills, but spent every moment he could painting. After a short stint at the Art Institute of Chicago, Ary once again was on the move, relocating to New York City in 1919 at the age of 28. In New York, he studied at the National Academy of Design (the predecessor of what is now the National Academy Museum and School of Fine Arts). Ary moved in 1921 to Paris, where he lived and worked for 12 years. He soon earned a reputation on both sides of the Atlantic for his atmospheric landscapes, as well as his elegant portraits of women. Traveling to North Africa and Palestine, Stillman also created watercolor portraits of individuals from various cultures. Although Stillman was certainly exposed to abstract art as well as the beginnings of the surrealist movement in Paris, he did not immediately embrace these new ideas, responding instead to the impressionists’ experiments with light and atmosphere.He experienced commercial and artistic success in Paris, including a one-man show at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune and regular exhibits at the Salon d'Automne, Salon des Echanges (1932), Salon National des Beaux-Arts and the Salon de Tuileries. Although his work had been largely objective until the early 1930s, a careful study of his early art reveals the roots of his later abstract work and shows his interest in the artistic arrangement of shapes to convey a subjective meaning. Following his own independent and wayward course moving from representational art to the post war, painterly style of abstract art inspired by cubism and surrealism. In 1933 Stillman returned to New York. There, he painted the familiar landmarks of the city, capturing the vibrant crowds and the cadence of urban life.
In the late 1930s, Stillman produced works for the Easel division of the WPA under the Federal Art Project and was a member of the Artists’ Union and the American Artists’ Congress. Stillman knew Arshile Gorky, Byron Browne, Adolphe Gottlieb and many other important artists of his day. Stillman was also a member of the Society of Independent Artists (SIA). He participated in numerous exhibitions, and his art was well received by the public and the press. Among other galleries, from 1935-1937 Ary exhibited at the Guild Art Gallery owned and directed by Margaret Lefranc. His work during this time became more subjective (although still representational). At this time Ary became more concerned with his interpretation of the deeper inner content of his subject, and less interested with its objective outer form. In the 1940s the center of the modernist avant-garde moved from Paris to New York when Stillman’s colleagues such as Jackson Pollock and Willem De Kooning combined the spontaneous, aggressive gestures of Surrealism and the linear, geometric innovations of cubism into the potent cocktail known today as Abstract Expressionism, or the New York School. Starting in 1944, Stillman began to exhibit with the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors that included Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman. His abstract work from this period was shown in New York’s most influential galleries including Tanager Gallery, the Saltpeter Gallery, and the Mortimer Brandt Gallery, and received important reviews by the critics of the day.
When the horrors of the Holocaust were revealed, Ary abruptly shifted his focus to abstract works, and by 1948, his work was completely non-objective. During the early 1950s Ary had a one-person show every year at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City. Stillman took cues from his surroundings — be it Paris in the ’20s, New York in the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s, or Mexico in the ’60s — and, while absorbing the stylistic innovations of these decades, translated them through his own particular vision to arrive ultimately at a unique, mature body of work. In tracing the evolution of Stillman’s art, one finds evidence of his early academic training in Russia, the lingering spell of Impressionism in Europe in the early part of the twentieth century, and the mid-century impact of Abstract Expressionism in America. However, in examining his work , one discovers another story — the story of a young Jewish boy in Russia seeking to fulfill his dream of becoming an artist against all odds. In the course of his lifetime, Stillman overcame poverty, political turmoil, and failing health to pursue that goal Upon his death, the Stillman-Lack foundation was found, in accordance with his instructions, to preserve his work and make it available. In 2010 Columbia University received a collection of art works by Stillman, making Columbia the largest international repository of his works. Stillman worked in New York until the mid-1950s when he and his wife, Frances, moved to Cuernavaca, Mexico, where they lived from 1957 until 1962. Failing health forced him to return to the United States; he died in Houston, Texas in 1967. See less