The Stillman-Lack Foundation ::Publications

Many places served as home for Ary Stillman during his long and eventful lifetime.

There was the tiny village in White Russia where as a youngster he fulfilled a vague longing by cutting out designs from rough paper and filling them in with colors - a collage.

There was the mid-western town in the United States where the immigrant lad toiled to support himself, his mother, his sister and brothers, and then by night set up an easel and painted portraits and still-lifes.

There was Paris in the legendary 20's and 30's where aflame with the beauty of his surroundings he produced poetic and sensuously rich canvases acclaimed by Paris critics.

There was New York City where he played a leading role in the art scene of the 30's, 40's and early 50's, with a steady succession of one-man exhibitions and group showings.

And then in his last decade there was Cuernavaca.

Mexican Street Scene
1940
oil on canvas
19 x 25
Foundation Collection

He had visited Mexico earlier —back in 1940. Exhausted by the tempo of the New York art scene, he had hoped to find relaxation in Mexico. He found not only relaxation but excitement —peaceful villages and movement-filled city scenes. A visit of six months resulted in poetic landscapes —Saltillo, Orizaba, Guanajuato— and crowd-filled Mexico City scenes —outdoor markets, dance halls, such as Salon Mexico, which Aaron Copeland made famous to the music world.

Snake Spirits
1960
acrylic on canvas
24 x 18
Foundation Collection

It was in 1957 that Ary Stillman again repaired to Mexico following a disastrous year of illness, an eye injury which threatened to become permanent, the loss of his New York studio, and a fruitless search for a suitable home in Paris.

It was early in May that Ary and I took a plane for Mexico City. It was the first time we had flown and I was frightened, but Ary was fascinated by the view from the window -- cities, stretches of country and finally cloud masses. I think he had imagined all this previously, but the actuality was a delight to him. In Mexico City we went to the Hotel Ontario, down in the old section not too far from the Zocalo --typically Mexican of the end of the last century. We discussed where we should locate ourselves, and had almost decided on San Miguel de Allende, when Ary met on the street an artist he knew from New York, Judson Briggs. Judson insisted that we come to Cuernavaca to look it over at least -- the climate was perfect, he said -- it was only about 46 miles from Mexico City and could be reached by bus, and it was ideal in tempo and surroundings for an artist. So off to Cuernavaca we went, and it proved to be the setting for us for five years and for summer vacations for several additional years.

Ceremonial
1962
acrylic on canvas
19 1/8 x 25 1/8
The Appleton Museum of Art, FL

Cuernavaca truly is, as the natives boast, the land of eternal springtime. Situated in a valley, surrounded by mountains, including Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl, famous from Aztec times, it is protected from any severe changes of weather.

Soon after we got there the summer rains began, and lasted through September, but they occur only in the evening and nighttime, and the days are unbelievably fresh and beautiful. The fall, winter and early spring are dry, sunny and delightfully mild, and there are flower-laden trees, bougainvillea vines, and blossoms of all sorts blooming every month of the year.

Ary loved the little furnished house we rented and was interested and amused sitting at the outdoor cafes on the square, watching the colorful and animated scene. But it was long before he began to paint. He seemed drained of all creative energy; once in a while he would take up his brushes listlessly and try to paint, but there was nothing ready to bring forth. Also, although the scarred eye was improved, there was still a problem of coordinating the focusing of the two eyes. I know he worried about his inability to work. But it took more than a year before he finally laid in a store of canvases and began ever so slowly to paint. By that time we were installed on Morelos Street in a duplex house, which had a lower and upper garden. We had the upper floor and garden -- stone steps at the back of the lower part of the house and garden led up to our quarters. There was an enormous verandah overlooking the lower garden with a view of lemon trees, bougainvillea vines in brilliant red, purple and light blue, and beds of flowers, all hemmed in by a high brick wall, with vista of blue sky and church steeples beyond.

Group with Little Prince
1963
acrylic on canvas
15 1/2 x 18 1/2
Private Collection

We had been making occasional visits to Houston where Ary's sister and her family, the Lacks, lived. In 1963 Ary's deteriorating health led us to take up permanent residence in Houston, returning to Cuernavaca in the summertime.

It was in the summer of 1963 that Ary gave up gouaches for the most part and embarked on a series of exciting canvases, which he called "Leyendas" (Legends). They had marvelous movement and each represented a world of fantasy - a pagan world, but permeated with glimpses of Egyptian, Byzantine, Coptic, Italian -- every kind of culture, which had intrigued him during his lifetime. Manny Greer of the Greer Galleries in New York came down to Mexico that summer and paid a visit to our place. He was wildly enthusiastic about the new canvases. He said he had been combing the studios of Mexican painters and here, in the studio of a veteran American painter, he found the essence of pre-Columbian Mexico that the others lacked. But Ary was adamant about not exhibiting. He had strength only to paint, he said. To be involved in exhibiting would drain too much of the precious store of energy.

Man and Woman
1964
acrylic on canvas
13 1/2 x 20
Foundation Collection, TX

As Ary said, in Mexico he felt ever more strongly the essence of the "inner reality," when he "was completely involved in the mysticism of the subconscious." More and more of his paintings flowed out of a dream world -- these were not paintings that one brooded over -- they poured out in a stream from his subconscious.

And with this spontaneous expression came a need for a medium, which would enable him to work swiftly. Oil paint, no matter how much he loved it, was slow drying and perhaps one would have to wait for days before continuing with a canvas that had been started. So he began to experiment with acrylic paint. Although it didn't have the rich, sensuous quality that oil can produce, its quick drying properties made it possible to get ideas down on canvas or paper before the dream world could evaporate. So all during our Mexican stay Ary used the acrylic paint.

Procession
1963
acrylic on canvas
15 1/2 x 22 1/2
Private Collection, CA

Then the evenings. There was news from the States by radio, but principally there was our reading. We read everything on pre-Cortez times that we could find. Prescott's history of the conquest of Mexico and Peru; Bernal diaz del Castillo, who described so quaintly and so graphically the country and the people and the details of the coming of the Spaniards, as one of Cortez' men; more recent writers on the culture of the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Incas. Also general mythology such as the Golden Bough, poetry such as The White Pony, an anthology of Chinese poetry from 1100 B.C. through 1921. All this fired Ary's imagination, and what with improved physical condition, greater peace of mind, and new stimuli to inspire him, Ary's incredibly rich imagination began to reassert itself. Now, he fantasized, he had discovered through excavating among ancient ruins, a "palace of the prince" and everything that poured forth as he sat in the arm-chair in the corner of the verandah was something he carried away from the walls of this ancient palace. So in 1960 he began a series of gouaches, which in creativeness, in spontaneity, in line and form are perhaps the culmination, or at least the beginning of the culmination of his entire career as a non-representational painter. Ary felt that himself, "I am a new Ary" he would say. He even decided that this new Ary should have his name on the paintings rather than the old Stillman whose depression he had fought off. So one will find that practically all of the gouaches and many of the later canvases bear the name Ary. Later on, after we left Mexico, he drifted back into signing Stillman again.


From the Temple of the Young Prince 1961 gouache on paper 21 x 22 The Columbus Museum of Art, GA	Ritual 1965 gouache on paper 26 x 20 Montclair Art Museum, NJ
Gradually, slowly, Ary began to introduce color into the canvases. They were becoming more decisive also. That they had impact was quite clear to us when Bart, a Duth painter, came over one day and as Ary brought out one canvas after another all Bart could say was; "Jesus, Ary! Jesus!" Life was beginning to be happy for Ary. Mornings were spent working in the garden, marketing with or without me at the street stands, which lined the way to the big market, sitting at one of the outdoor cafes on the square, sipping a cappuccino. Then dinner out on the verandah -- at this altitude everyone has his main meal in the middle of the day. Then a nap, and about three o'clock, refreshed by sleep and a cup of tea, Ary would settle himself in the armchair in the corner of the verandah, sit there dreaming for some time and then taking up his brushes, begin to transfer his dreams to canvas. About six o'clock he would put his work away and we would go down to one of the cafes again, to meet with friends or just to sit there taking in the lively scene, listening to the Mariachi bands. Later during our stay, after we had studied Spanish for some time by ourselves, we enrolled as "oyentes" at the little university a couple of blocks away, and attended six and seven o'clock classes there, listening to lectures on literature, psychology -- whatever was offered -- just to get the diction and the feeling of the language. The youngsters probably thought we were quite crazy, but they were very respectful and courteous to us anyway.

Scherzo (Calligraphic)
1960
acrylic on canvas
Green Room
University of Houston,
Moores School of Music, TX

Ary loved the garden -- he was up early in the morning and out there in his bathrobe and straw-brimmed hat, raking the leaves and putting the place to rights, even before he had his breakfast. He fixed a corner for himself on the verandah, where there was a big armchair. There he set up the small easel he had bought in Paris and there the flow of creativeness gradually came back to him. At first he avoided colors -- the distorted vision of the right eye still bothered him, but he felt that he could handle black and white. One of Ary's great delights was to go to the old cathedral not far from our house, and to walk inside the walls, seeing every time new images and fantastic blends of textures -- a marvelous patina that had evolved through the years from wind and sun and particles of earth. One of Ary's black and white canvases from that period which he named "Design on an Old Wall" showed strong black curving lines making sort of a flowing figure, against a background which gives the feeling of the texture of these walls.


Caprice 1961 gouache on paper Green Room University of Houston, Moores School of Music, TX	Stained Glass #2 1961 gouache on paper Heckscher Museum of Art, NY
The excitement and high pitch of creative energy carried over intermittently for the remainder of his life. In his final months he would be lost in melancholy for hours at a time but when he roused himself enough to paint, the old spirit would reassert itself and some powerful and striking canvases were forthcoming. To sum up Ary's Cuernavaca experience I should like to quote from Richard Teller Hirsch's introduction to the 1972 Stillman Retrospective at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts: "…living in Mexico he pondered Mayan riddles. He worked to say powerful things evoked from strange dimensions of time. The Mayas and the Incas haunted him, his brush moved boldly in answer to echoes within his mind as his intuition evoked them…It was a free communion in strong, effervescing terms with something felt, the feeling of another timeless cosmos. Such from the depths of despair, were the flowerings, which Ary Stillman brought forth. He had once been a painter who saw with feeling. In the last years of rebirth, feeling had made him surpass response to mere visual perception. Growing in strength, although his body grew weaker, commanding obedience from his tools to state fervently and decisively the inner dictates of his intuitive echoings Ary Stillman, the visionary, triumphed, his work achieved, destiny fulfilled …"