3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 72 DRAWING FROM LIFE Ary Stillman and the School of Paris Susan Power 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 74 62. Self Portrait (dessiné par lui-même), 1927 Reproduced in Petit Journal, Paris, December 1927 Clipping, The Stillman-Lack Foundation ike many of the foreign painters and sculptors flocking eventually nurture his breakthrough to abstraction. Lto Paris after the First World War, Ary Stillman (fig. Having spent nearly half of his life in the United States, in 62) gravitated to the heart of the Parisian art scene in 1920 Stillman arrived in Europe as an American, albeit search of another world. For him it was the distant yet one with Russian and Jewish roots. Once in Paris, he familiar setting of his youthful dreams in Russia, dreams of unpacked his suitcases in a modest studio at 233, rue becoming an artist. With its reputation as the world- d’Alésia, strategically located between the bustling renowned capital of the arts and its cultivated allure, center of Montparnasse and the buzzing studio complex Paris had long been attracting an international artistic La Ruche (The Beehive). In the 1920s, Montparnasse crowd. This initiatory rite of passage was considered de was indeed a hive of artistic activity, with its teeming Left rigueur for any serious-minded artist—especially Bank cafés—Le Dôme, La Rotonde, and Le Select—the Americans, who had yet to cut the cultural umbilical cord terraces of which doubled as informal meeting places for with Europe. Cosmopolitan Paris beckoned to those the vibrant and diverse cultural community. seeking a cultural haven, one that offered artistic Ary Stillman’s twelve-year stint in Europe was freedom as well as a dynamic and affordable setting, characterized by wanderlust and restlessness, a where the adventurous and ambitious could navigate the penchant for movement that would become a constant well-established networks of academies, salons, theme throughout his life. His early years in Paris were galleries, and museums packed with masterpieces. punctuated with forays elsewhere, both in France and While for Stillman the transatlantic voyage was abroad. Following in the footsteps of admired French undoubtedly one of discovery, it was also a return to an painters, and particularly the Fauves such as Henri interrupted period of his youth, a formative time when his Matisse, Pierre Bonnard, and Othon Friesz, Stillman natural inclination and ability gained him entrance to the gained inspiration from the peoples and landscapes of Academy of Fine Arts in Vilna and set him on a course southern Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. that would have naturally led him to enroll in the Imperial The rapid, lively ink drawings from Stillman’s Moroccan Academy of Art (now the Russian Academy of Arts) in St. sketchbook (fig. 63) render the flavor of his exotic Petersburg. Leaving his adopted home in Sioux City, surroundings with the flowing rhythms that were later to Iowa, Ary Stillman embarked on a solitary journey, one emerge in his unusual Pueblo dance series as well as that proved to be a fruitful quest to consolidate the his later abstract work. Early figure drawings from live foundations of his representational style, but one that models at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière (fig. would also provide the basis for later developments and 64) exhibit a fluidity and economy of line that underlie previous spread Notre Dame de Paris (detail), 1928 Oil on canvas 1 1 19 2 × 24 2 in. (49.5 × 62.2 cm) Private collection 74 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 76 63. Morocco No. 19, c. 1926–27 64. Early Figure Study No. 3, Pen and ink c. 1921–28 1 1 5 2 × 4 4 in. (14 × 10.8 cm) Sanguine conte´ crayon on paper 1 The Stillman-Lack Foundation (727a) 11 × 17 2 in. (27.9 × 44.5 cm) The Stillman-Lack Foundation (726) 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 78 65. Still Life with Birds, 1928 Oil on canvas 1 33 4 × 41 in. (84.5 × 104.1 cm) Art Center Association of Sioux City and buttress the sensuous painterly treatment of his press, which applauded Stillman’s poetic sensibility and nudes and portraits on canvas.1 This combination of lyrical expression. studio sketches and plein air studies provided him One French critic, picking up on the range of ample opportunity to develop his hand and sharpen his Stillman’s pictorial concerns, described him as “a eye, to capture the essence and inner poetry of his painter who is constantly experimenting in many subjects, whether in the natural landscape, the human directions and who has a splendid feeling for color form, or the arrangements of objects in his still lifes. harmonies.” 5 In Still Life with Birds (fig. 65), Man with Once Stillman had assimilated these lessons with a Red Beret (Portrait of C.G. Nelson) (fig. 67), Nude keen sense of observation of the world around him, he (fig. 20), and Self-Portrait (fig. 66), the subdued set about creating works that would gain visibility in the palette—combining predominantly earth tones with annual salons—initially at the Société Nationale des shades of gray and added contrasts of red accents or Beaux-Arts in 1926 and 1927, followed by the Société luminous whites—coupled with the enclosed spatial des Artistes Indépendants and Salon d’Automne in arrangement of these compositions, conveys a sense 1928.2 Receiving instant recognition, Stillman’s artistic of meditative, perhaps melancholy, introspection.6 output of these years culminated in a one-man show at In the Ile-de-France landscapes, Bridge at Moret the prestigious Bernheim-Jeune gallery on the Right (French Bridge) (fig. 68) and Notre Dame de Paris Bank.3 The accompanying catalogue, prefaced by Louis (fig. 69), the greenery of vegetation introduces Vauxcelles, eloquently described the “delicate chromatic variation, whereas the warm ocher tones gentleness” of the paintings, which exhibited “a of the southern architecture and cool azure of the discretion both reserved and melodious . nuanced Mediterranean sky in Post Office, Cassis (fig. 70) and harmonies, a charming, contemplative intimacy.”4 Landscape, Cassis (fig. 71) enliven the starkness of the Stillman’s impressionistic handling of pigment creates the town square in winter, with its empty benches and the muted atmospheric qualities that harmonize with the leafless nudity of the silhouetted tree. The somber graceful line and compositional cadence of the interiority of Stillman’s portraits and still lifes is echoed in paintings. This representative display of thirty works— the stillness and quiet of his landscapes, which evoke including portraiture, nudes, provincial French the poetic sensibility and artistic temperament noted landscapes executed in Moret and Cassis, still lifes, repeatedly by critics in his work of this period. Writing several Palestine watercolors, and an enigmatic self- of Stillman’s Bernheim-Jeune show, Maximilien portrait—was extensively reviewed in the international Gauthier extolled the concealed mastery of structure 78 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 80 66. Self-Portrait, c. 1925 67. Man with Red Beret (Portrait of Oil on canvas C.G. Nelson), 1925 1 1 35 2 × 28 4 in. (90.2 × 71.8 cm) Oil on canvas 3 1 Art Center Association of Sioux City 36 4 × 30 4 in. (93.3 × 76.8 cm) Art Center Association of Sioux City 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 82 68. Bridge at Moret (French 69. Notre Dame de Paris, 1928 Bridge), 1928 Oil on canvas 1 1 Oil on canvas 19 2 × 24 2 in. (49.5 × 62.2 cm) 1 1 19 2 × 24 2 in. (49.5 × 62.2 cm) Private collection Private collection 3STILL 72-95 SPv5.qxd 1/2/08 18:55 Page 84 70. Post Office, Cassis, 1928 Oil on canvas 21 × 25 in. (53.3 × 63.5 cm) Collection of the University of Houston, gift of the Stillman-Lack Foundation (location: Moores School of Music, Ary Stillman Green Room) underlying the canvases, which he hailed as “poems nationality merits commentary in view of the prevalent simple and direct, which come from the heart and attitudes of the time. The complexity of the inter-war move the heart.”7 Another critic referred to the “peculiar period inevitably invites art historians to reflect upon the spiritual approach . that imbues his work with a political and social issues embedded in questions of strange mystic quality,” and pondered whether the national identity and cultural production.10 The “School of effect was “the reflection of his Russian heritage.”8 Paris” label itself—which the French critic André Warnod The recurring motifs of introspection and lyricism in defined in 1925 to distinguish the diversity of foreign paintings from Stillman’s period of self-imposed artists working in Paris from the academic French European exile seem to reflect significantly his physical School—arose out of the artistic debates fueled by French situation and his resulting state of mind, both factors that nationalism in the 1920s.11 Further complicating matters were to have a lasting impact on his art. Cultivating his was the way in which the often radically opposed in-between status, which spanned two continents and aesthetic concerns of avant-garde Modernist groups and cultures—the Old World experience of his Russian– the official artists aligned with more traditional academic Jewish heritage and the New World promise of another practice frequently crossed over national boundaries, life in America—Stillman approached his art similarly, particularly in the 1920s with the prevalent return to interweaving subjectivity and acute observation, layering figuration and classicism.