19 Facts About Sidney Tillim

Sidney Tillim 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.

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

Sidney 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.

Sidney Tillim began the transition away from "straight" figurative art in 1979 by way of a Cubo-Expressionist style, as in An American Tragedy.

Sidney Tillim had stumbled upon a process that made concrete his ideas about reproduction, repetition, fabrication, and postmodernist art.

In 1992 Sidney Tillim started rubbing opaquing film on paper, scraping the film with his fingernails, brushes, scissors, etc.

In painting Sidney Tillim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Yaddo Fellowship, and Ingram Merrill Foundation for the Arts Grant.

Sidney Tillim, one of Leider's early East-Coast hires, was a contributing editor from 1965 to 1970.

From 1958 to 1965 Sidney Tillim wrote as many as fifty exhibition reviews a month.

Regardless, like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who was his colleague at Arts, Sidney Tillim began to sense that criticism and the practice of painting were incompatible.

Sidney Tillim assembled two groups of essays for publication.

Sidney Tillim taught art history, painting, and art criticism at Bennington College for nearly three decades, from 1966 to 1994.

Sidney Tillim was the second of three children born to Norman and Anna Sidney Tillim, and was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family.

Sidney Tillim's father was a merchant marine, often away from home.

Much like him, Sidney Tillim was a "dude" when it came to dress.

In high school Sidney Tillim took art courses and wrote and drew sports cartoons for the high school weekly.

In 1956 Sidney Tillim married Muriel Schochen, the founding director of the Children's Theater at the 92nd Street YM-YWHA, New York.

In January 2018 the Sidney Tillim Archive was donated to the New York Public Library.