Ary And Music
“Ary never consciously
tried to translate music into painting. However he would often
say to people who were seeking some explanation of his abstractions,
‘Look at them the way you listen to music.’”
Music was Ary's love, after painting. He was an
avid concert-goer, and in his New York studio he always had
the radio tuned to the music stations as he worked. He didn't
know one note from another, but he usually could recognize any
composer he had heard to any extent, through the structure of
the composition. I found it interesting to note the reviews
in which his paintings were compared to music. Of course the
paintings mentioned were named after they were painted, simply
for exhibition purposes, since the public likes a title. Ary
never consciously tried to translate music into painting. However
he would often say to people who were seeking some explanation
of his abstractions, "Look at them the way you listen to
music." In other words, don't seek a literary connotation;
this is an abstract art like music.
From New York press:
"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
"…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
