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P U B L I C A T I O N S > R E M I N I S C E N C E S
Cuernavaca - Houston (1957 - 1967)
It was early in May of 1957 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 form the
Zocalo —typically Mexican of the end of last century —
it had been recommended to us by the then Director of the Museum
of Fine Arts in Houston, Lee Malone. With Nick Curcio, Ary's
old friend from the 1940s, and his wife Lydia we discussed where
we should locate ourselves, and had almost decided on San Miguel
d'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. He and another artist Ary had known years before,
Frank ________, had just opened an art school there. So off
to Cuernavaca we went, and it proved to be the setting for us
for 5 years, and for summer vacations for several additional
years. 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 awhile 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. Nick Curcio would reassure me and tell me that Ary would come forth after this period of inactivity strong and fresh again in his painting. But it took more than a year before he finally laid in a store of canvases and began ever so slowly to work. 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 lead up to our quarters. There was an enormous verandah, overlooking the lower garden, with 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, and a vista of blue sky and church steeples beyond. At the back of our garden there was a pen with two sheep, belonging to the people in a house facing the street, the property of our landlord. The sheep were dirty looking and smelly and very belligerent, constantly fighting with one another. One day they banged at the wooden slats of their pen until they broke it down and they came bounding out into the garden where I was busy with the flowers. I was terrified — and Ary made a terrible rumpus until the man who owned the sheep had his farmer-brother come and take them away. 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. Some
of his most interesting compositions were painted at that time,
including "Introspection" which is reproduced, albeit
inadequately, at the back of the Foundation booklet. 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" shows strong black curving lines making
sort of a flowing figure, against a background which gives the
feeling of the texture of these walls. Gradually, slowly, Ary
began to introduce color into the canvases. They were becoming
more and more decisive also. That they had impact was quite
clear to us both when Bart _____ , a Dutch painter who had settled
in Mexico, came over one day and, as Ary brought out one canvas
after another, all Bart could say was, "Jesus, Ary! Jesus!" 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 A.D. 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 armchair in the corner of the verandah,
was something he had 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 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 and when the "new
Ary" spirit seemed to blend more into the old Stillman
spirit, he drifted back into signing "Stillman'" again. In the summer of 1963,
Ary gave up gouaches for the most part and embarked on a series
of very 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 Ary 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, and 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
strength that remained. "When I am dead and gone, these
works will be recognized," he would tell me. "Now
I must paint." To the very end he was searching, striving
for fuller expression of himself. "If I could only have
ten more years," he would say as we sat talking at night
in the house on Morelos. "Just ten more years — only
now I can see what I could accomplish if I am granted the years
and the strength. Now it really is beginning to unfold, all
I have striven for during my lifetime." But I am sure that
if Ary could have lived to 90, he would still say, "I am
just beginning — now I begin to see." Of course many
times Ary would be in the depth of depression at having had
to give up the studio and the life among artists in New York,
but he would pull out of it when the inspiration for a new canvas
would come over him. Now he painted only small canvases, for
he didn't have the strength to pace up and down, as one has
to do with a big canvas. But he consoled himself: "I will
paint something big on a small canvas. It is the conception,
not the space, that makes a canvas big."
It is hazy to me just
how long we remained in Houston that time, but I do know that
before the next summer came around, we were again occupying
the house on Morelos Street in Cuernavaca. It was the summer
of 1963 when Ary began his series of "Leyenda"
canvases, and the excitement and renewed burst of creativity
engendered then carried over for the remainder of Ary's painting
career. In 1964 we decided to make a change and go to Guadalajara
for the summer but it was an unhappy experience, for the climate
proved very bad for Ary — he would lie awake gasping for
breath at night, and the violent thunderstorms which would take
place almost daily would shake him to the very depths. We left
after about six weeks, and after a wild night flight to Mexico
City in a small plane, through crashing thunder and terrifying
flashes of lightning as the plane careened back and forth, we
finally arrived in Houston about 2 a.m. and Ary had to be half-carried
upstairs to bed. From then on it was a losing fight as far as Ary's
physical condition was concerned. His sense of balance became
more and more uncertain and our walks became shorter and shorter
until it was a matter of a dozen steps at a time, then a pause
to rest, and the whole effort over again, for a couple of blocks
at most. He would be sunk for hours at a time in melancholy.
But when he aroused himself enough to paint, the old spirit
was still there, and some of his very finest canvases were painted
in these last number of months. He felt handicapped by the small
easel which he had used in Cuernavaca, so I got a very large
one, about eight feet high, and Ary was delighted with it as
there were some oil paintings from New York which he wanted
to re-work. One of these is the canvas, which still occupies
the easel in his studio room in our house on Portsmouth Street
-- the room which Ary never got to make use of. For in February
1966 Ary attained his long-cherished dream of owning a house
of his own where he could paint and display his paintings, but
while this little home on Portsmouth was being renovated for
us, Ary was stricken with the illness from which he never recovered.
After nine weeks in the hospital he had had a stroke, and while
not paralyzed from it, his powers of locomotion were impaired,
also his will to go on. He did have some months in the little
house, and we gradually had paintings framed and began to hang
them in the front rooms, which were converted into a sort of
museum. We would wheel Ary around in his wheelchair and he would
sit gazing at one painting after another. "My painting
— my beautiful painting," I would hear him murmur
at times, as if he were contemplating a cherished child.
There is, for instance, what I consider a very
interesting still-life. For several years Ary had toyed with
the idea of setting up a still life to see how he would handle
it, after all his years of non-representational painting. He
had a great curiosity about this, and finally he carried out
his experiment. The painting is listed in the records as "Cuernavaca-Houston
No. 52." It seems to me very striking. After this he tried
a larger canvas, consisting of a still-life with an out-of-doors
view that is really an abstraction. This (Cuernavaca-Houston
No. Xl) was, I believe, less successful; in fact I feel sure
that Ary would eventually have changed it or destroyed it.
Another strange painting is a small head of a man with beret and bone-rimmed glasses. One finds a resemblance to Ary, yet there is a sort of Oriental surface blandness and an inscrutable quality to the look. It is not third dimensional, like most of Ary's work; it is very flat and very simply outlined, painted with the utmost economy of line and detail. To me there is something very significant psychologically about it. It is almost as if, near the end of his days, as Ary knew he was, he consciously or unconsciously was discarding everything but the basic essentials, all details were now meaningless. On another small canvas Ary painted two heads — one a patriarchal, Biblical sort of concept; the other a round face with a strange illumination — a sort of glow.
In these paintings Ary
was, as he explained to me, just "playing." He said
it took too much concentration, too much strength, to create
non-representational compositions — he was not physically
or emotionally up to it. It was not an indication that he would
have gone back to representational painting. Again and again
he would tell me how happy he was that he had made the break
in his painting style when he did. He felt that if he had gone
on in the old pattern, he would have "dried up;" there
was such an excitement, such a challenge to sit in front of
a blank canvas and from nothing to create something — to
see a concept gradually develop and take form.
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