Ary Stillman
July 2-?, 1929
St. Louis, Missouri
By Ruth Boyd
The St. Louis Times
July 5, 1929
H.Ary Stillman has reversed the customary procedure
of American artists by coming to exhibit in this country with
an established European reputation. His success has caused him
to be claimed as a Pole by Polish critics, and as a compatriot
by Russian critics; for Stillman was born in the Russo-Polish
province of Minsk, coming to this country when still in his 'teens.
Most of his study has been done in Europe, where he went in 1921.
He has exhibited five times at the Paris Salons, and recently
was granted a one-man show at the Bernheim-Jeune Galleries. Ary
Stillman comes to St. Louis after having exhibited in New York,
and he plans, after showing his European and Palestine work in
several other museums, including the Chicago Art Institute, to
spend the winter paintings in Santa Fe, thence the finest sense
of the word, just as that same term has been applied to Charles
W. Hawthorne, with whose work all lovers of the museum are familiar.
There is a resemblance between the two, not only in the spiritual
quality of their approach to their subjects, but also in their
devotion to texture. Ary Stillman has been as concerned with the
rendition of the beautiful surface and aged look of the old stone
walls in the south of France as was Hawthorne with those in Italy
during that Italian sojourn which so changed the manner of his
painting.
It will be interesting to observe what changes in
Ary Stillman's art will be brought about during his stay in America;
certainly the one landscape painted recently in Tulsa is different
in feeling and in tonality from those done in France.
The St. Louis Star
July 2, 1929
Artist Here Says He Paints What He Feels, Not
What He Sees
The City Art Museum is exhibiting this month in
Gallery 31 some twenty-five or thirty portraits, landscapes and
still lifes, and visitors this week may see the artist himself,
H. Ary Stillman, a slight, sandy-haired young man, who came to
St. Louis last Friday and will be here until Saturday. Then he
goes to New Mexico to paint American scenes as he painted those
of France and Palestine.
The majority of the pictures are landscapes, done
in oil, although one wall of the gallery is hung with watercolors,
painted in Palestine. One landscape of a scene near Tulsa, OK.,
is the only American subject in the exhibition. This picture,
Stillman pointed out, "has more color, more expression of
joy" in contrast with "Courtyard in Moret," which
is "subdued and reversed, an expression of age and melancholy."
Another landscape, showing a courtyard with one
tree, he characterizes as "not beautiful, but full of character,
and character is the thing I look for in painting."
"I paint a picture as I feel it, not as I see
it. If a tree is there, but is not necessary to picture, I leave
the tree out when I paint."
Stillman is 38 years old and unmarried. He is a
naturalized American citizen, having come to this country from
Russia in 1906. He worked as a goldsmith apprentice in a Sioux
City, IA., jewelry store, finally owned the store and then sold
it to be free to study art.