Sidney Tillim at Usdan Gallery, Bennington College - Bennington, VT

Although I came to know Sidney Tillim's work fairly well after I met him in 1981 (he died in 2001), even I was surprised by the variety, as well as the quality, of this retrospective memorial exhibition. The figurative paintings and geometric abstractions of the mid-1950s led, a decade later, to Poussinesque history tableaux, which by 1980 had given way to large-scale abstractions. A studio accident led Tillim to invent a method of painting with acrylic-soaked paper towels; unconfined by what might have become a signature style, he turned, after a few years, to achieving related effects with the brush. A work from 1996 showed a colored grid fading out and figuration fading in; Tillim's last body of work was a series of paintings based on photographs, news stories and the movies. The small selection of drawings included in this exhibition ran a similar gamut, from line-and-wash sketches that reveal Tillim to be one of the great draftsmen of his day, to abstractions made by scratching colored Correct-Type on painted grounds in what was essentially a small-scale version of the paper-towel method.

Tillim was, in short, one of those artists driven to work in a multiplicity of styles. This is not to say that there were not common elements visible amid the variety. The show as a whole demonstrated his remarkable "color sense, often featuring various greens, purples, pinks and oranges along with black and blue, always used with an eye to spatial effects. In Diderot in Hawaii (1988), for instance, pink drips cohabit a tall rectangle with teal-green circles seemingly applied with paper towels, over dark-green brushstrokes and bright-green glitter. The combination of towel and brush mixes signs for the "mechanical" and the "manual" to create a maniacal synthesis of order and gesture that is at once emotionally affecting and coolly intelligent. The same forces of artistic personality are visible in Tillim's constant playing with flatness, setting perspectival clues against uniform values and geometric structures.

The most successful of the history paintings was the 1974 John Adams Accepting the Defense of the Boston Massacre Defendants. Looking like the work of a hyper-sophisticated colonial primitive, this image of a man of principle facing down a mob is a self-portrait (among many in the show). While topically a reaction to academic Vietnam War politics, it's a beautiful emblem of Tillim's resistance to esthetic fashion, his will always to say just what he wanted.

Tillim gave decades of dedication to teaching at Bennington College, which should have made a greater effort to publicize, catalogue and otherwise celebrate this exhibition, which instead remained something of an in-group secret. This is a great pity, and I hope that some other institutions will restage it for others to see.

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