Critical realist: Katy Siegel on Sidney Tillim - Critical Essay

Sidney Tillim began his career as an art critic by answering a "Help Wanted" ad in the back of Arts Digest. It was 1953, and at the time, he was an occasional sports reporter and a struggling painter who had recently attended Syracuse University (alma mater also to Hilton Kramer, Clement Greenberg, and college friend Sol LeWitt) on the GI Bill. Tillim started writing about art for the money, such as it was: four dollars per review. After he was fired in the mid-'50s for doing the galleries in tennis shoes, Kramer invited him back to the retitled Arts Magazine, and in 1959 he became a full-time writer, producing articles and reviews at the breakneck pace of up to fifty an issue--steady employment that still left him two weeks a month to concentrate on painting. The striving son of working-class, Orthodox Jewish parents in Virginia, Tillim (1925-2001) saw his magazine work as a way to earn a living in New York while devoting himself further to writing about and making art. Although he had a college degree, it was in painting, and Syracuse was, as he put it, a "yeshiva" compared with schools like Harvard and Oxford. His knowledge was mostly self-earned and won at a psychological cost.

Proudly the first abstract painter at Syracuse, Tillim's bent toward geometric abstraction--the somewhat conservative purview of the American Abstract Artists and followers of Mondrian such as Burgoyne Diller--was, if not in direct opposition, then oblique to the more fashionable gestural style of Pollock, Kline, and de Kooning. One of his first major essays for Arts Magazine, "What Happened to Geometry?," from 1959, bemoans the styles decline and the pressure to--as Sidney Geist put it--"jump into the water where the rest of us are," although he did see signs of hope in younger artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Myron Stout. In the sort of caustic phrase that would remain characteristic of his criticism throughout his career, Tillim decried AbEx as, "if not entirely dominated by the profit motive," then at best a "sentimental Bohemianism." For thirty-odd years, he relentlessly pointed out the posturings and ironies of the avant-garde, seeming to take personally the pretense of superiority to the great unwashed.

In his own art, placing himself in even starker contrast with the historical moment, he had begun to turn more and more to figurative painting. In a 1960 one-man exhibition at Cober Gallery in New York, he showed fourteen geometric paintings

from the mid-1950s and sixteen figurative paintings from the late 1950s. Donald Judd, reviewing the show in Arts, found the abstractions "strong" but saw the switch to realism as a "serious mistake" that landed the artist in a "historical cul de sac" (Tillim later returned the favor in his skeptical review of a Judd show). Tillim himself was conflicted: The fact that high culture was something foreign, urban, upper class, left him aspiring to tough-minded abstraction but feeling guilty about wanting something alien to his own family and class background; he also had a real feeling for the realism and decoration most people enjoy.

Tillim's articles from the early '60s, written mostly for Arts, continued to inveigh against the lingering orthodoxies of Art News and Abstract Expressionism (according to Tillim, his particularly harsh criticism of Franz Kline in 1964 cost him a job at Parsons School of Design). At the time, Arts was a haven of diverse opinion, publishing a range of voices including Kramer, Annette Michelson, Michael Fried, Vivien Raynor, Leo Steinberg, and Judd. Most notably, Tillim was the first critic on record supporting Pop art. His February 1962 rave about Claes Oldenburg's The Store, 1961, issued from a complex and personal set of interests: America seen through immigrant's eyes, "mass man and his artifacts," representation, and social change. In contrast to negative responses from many critics his age, Tillim saw Pop as the new American Dream, accompanied by new patrons who felt vindicated by the avant-garde's adoption of the traditional kitsch that was their proper culture, rather than the "difficult" constructions of European abstraction. He wrote, "It was the very simulacrum of the ultimate in American variety store, a combination of neighborhood free enterprise and Sears and Roebuck.... It also is something of an answer to Coolidge's simplistic notion that 'the business of America is business,' but in its crazy mixed-up way doesn't know whether to laugh or to cry." Later in life, he realized that his strong response to Oldenburg was propelled by childhood memories of the "Jew store" in his hometown.

Tillim's enthusiasm for Pop, as well as a broader realism, began to define his identity as a critic. In 1965, Max Kozloff approached Tillim to write regularly for Artforum, which would move from Los Angeles to New York a couple of years later. According to Tillim, editor Philip Leider saw the magazine as existing between two poles: Tillim himself and Michael Fried (that is, between eclectic, figurative interests and a rigorous Greenbergian abstract formalism). Whether or not this was true, Tillim's writing for Artforum often addressed not only Pop, but realist painters like Philip Pearlstein and Alex Katz; although he made his judgments artist by artist, painting by painting, by no means uniformly praising the work (even the artists he championed often ended up not speaking to him), he became known as "the figurative guy."