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Excerpts From New York City Press About Ary & Music,
1946-1952

"These new compositions bear a direct relation to music and might appropriately be called tone poems. A number of them are on Indian themes, including the large Indian Legend, with shimmering water suggested in the foreground, moving back and around, but always within the picture frame."

The Art Digest
February 15, 1946


"... a style dominated by a new lyric use of color and aiming at suggestion rather than representation. Paintings on Indian themes remind one of music, as for example, Sibelius suggests an old tribal war mood in 'Saga.'"

New York Times
February 24, 1946


"... I use colors like a Composer uses musical notes,' he says, and although he has no actual system of color-and-sound counterparts, as some extreme theorists have attempted, Stillman’s paintings do remind one of the emotional overtones of certain musical compositions."

Pictures on Exhibit
February 1949

Jazz 1949 oil on canvas Green Room University of Houston, Moores School of Music, TX

"…Some titles, such as 'Jazz,' indicate that certain ones have been inspired by hearing music…"

New York Times
January 29, 1950


"Ary Stillman's current exhibition asserts again how well an abstract style can serve lyrical statement and enrich the evocative image… Musical themes inspire these paintings, and without descending to trite analogies, they successfully translate the intangibles of one art form into another. Overture, for example, captures the rising sense of promising beginnings that such a musical composition can offer…"

The Art Digest
February 1, 1950


"…Designed, for the most part, on musical themes (some of his titles are "Obligato," "Overture," and "Jazz," the handsome new canvases are rhythmical in pattern, so composed that the well-defined shapes hold together in almost magnetic fashion."

New York Herald-Tribune
January 26, 1950


"... the rippling cadences with which he defines a mass of form eliciting a sensation of movement…"

New York Herald-Tribune
January 21, 1951


"...Stillman's linear patterns always have been decidedly musical. This year they are choppier than last, as if he had been listening to Bartok instead of Debussy."

James Fitzimmons of Art Digest (now editor of Art International)
January 15, 1952


"...On the other hand, Ary Stillman’s paintings at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery carry abstraction deep into its 'romantic' phase. For him, plastic rhythms are a means of evoking poetic content. Color, refulgent and suggestive, stirs the visual imagination to respond to something beyond the world of pure shapes. Texture and technique are also used to this end...."

New York Times
January 27, 1952