Ary Stillman

Ary Stillman was born February 13, 1891 in a tiny village near Slutzk, White Russia. His early artistic talents appeared quickly and after his graduation from the school in Slutzk, he entered the Imperial School of Art in Vilna.

After less than two years in Vilna, he came to the United States and took up residence in Sioux City, Iowa in 1907. He worked in a jewelry store there. He had a short interlude of study at the Art Instutute of Chicago in 1912 then in 1919 went to New York City. He enrolled at once at the National Academy. During the day he painted at the academy and had chance for Art Students League or The Jewish Educational Alliance in the evenings.The second year in New York, Ary began to think about going to Europe.

Ary Stillman arrived in Paris in 1921 where he lived and worked for the next 12 years. In 1928, he had his first one man show in Paris at the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. In the following years he exhibited regularly in Paris at the Salon d'Automne, Salon National des Beaux-Arts and the Salon de Tulleries.

During these Paris years, his work was largely objective, but a careful study of his early canvases will show a definite preoccupation with the abstract core of his painting, and a continued interest in the arrangement of shapes to express a subjective meaning. The more academic nature of what we might call his Parisian period formed the necessary foundation for his later work in abstract design.

When Ary Stillman returned to New York in 1933 he came as an established painter. His paintings were still representational but with a subjectivity which continued to mark his works. It soon became evident that the artist was not concerned with superficial aspects but with the deeper inner content of his subject.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons that we find him turning gradually to abstraction and to non-objective forms. By the close of World War II, Ary Stillman found himself in a self-created world of abstract forms, always searching for a visible expression to the reality in life.

By 1948, Stillman's work became entirely non-figurative. From 1949 to 1954 Ary had annual one person shows at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York.

From 1957 to 1962, Ary lived and worked in Cuernavaca, Mexico. From 1962 to his death in January 1967, Ary Stillman lived in Houston, Texas.

A retrospective of his work was shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in February 1972.

For more information see "Reminiscences, The Personal Life of Artist Ary Stillman"

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