For many artists, drawing is a mnemonic aid in a much greater plan; plot lines to be dressed with the adornment of another medium. Not so for Sillman. 

Sewell Sillman (1924 -1992)

Spanish Crossing, 1963

 oil on masonite

36 x 48 inches

38 x 50 inches framed

Signed verso

Provenance:

Estate of Sewell Sillman, Stonington, CT 1992

Sewell Sillman was born in Savannah, Georgia, in 1924. He attended high school in Atlanta, where, in 1942, he enlisted in the United States Army Air Force Reserve. Simultaneously, he enrolled in evening classes at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and studied civil engineering there the first semester the following year. He spent the fall and winter of 1943 at the Johns Hopkins University in the Army Student Training program before being sent abroad, where he was wounded in the Battle of the Bulge.

After his discharge, he returned to Georgia Tech in early 1946,with a focus on architecture. Eventually becoming disaffected with the “oppressive” atmosphere at Georgia Tech – where an instructor called him a “misfit” – Sillman followed his friends William Ragland Watkins and Albert Lanier to Black Mountain College, just outside of Asheville, North Carolina.

Sillman recalled that Black Mountain College “…gave me a chance to  get rid of absolutely every standard that I had grown up with… It was like a snake that loses its skin… What was left was someone who had absolutely no idea in the world what to do…. It was marvelous.”

Faculty members at Black Mountain included former Bauhaus professor Josef Albers and his wife Anni, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, Walter Gropius and Robert Creeley. Among Sillman’s fellow students were Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Robert Rauschenberg, and Susan Weil.

Sillman initially continued his architectural studies with design visionary Buckminster Fuller, but it was his introduction to Josef Albers that would lead Sillman away from architecture to what would become a tireless lifelong push against the boundaries of visual possibility. As Sillman’s aesthetic inquiry grew, so did his inspired relationship with Albers, evolving from acolyte to collaborator.

Of Albers, Sillman said, “What you get from Albers is not something that you can codify, that you can exhibit, that you can mine and make a buck with… It’s basic soul study in a sense. It goes inside of you.”

Albers left Black Mountain College in 1949 and accepted the position of head of the Department of Design at Yale University. Sillman followed his mentor to Yale where he earned his BA in 1951 and his MFA in 1953 with a thesis on color.  In 1952, he returned to Black Mountain for the summer, but without Albers, Sillman found the place changed and dominated by abstract expressionism in the guise of fellow teachers Franz Kline and Jack Tworkov. “When Albers left it was just so empty… It was death warmed over.” 

He joined the Yale Department of Art faculty in 1954 teaching Color, Drawing and Painting, and later becoming Director of undergraduate programs in Art—a position that he held until 1966.  In 1962 Sillman co-­founded Ives-­Sillman, Inc., with fellow Yale artist Norman Ives, publishing fine art portfolios and individual prints by artists including Albers, Roy Lichtenstein, Ad Reinhardt, Willem de Kooning, Jean Dubuffet, Jacob Lawrence, Piet Mondrian and Romare Bearden.

Between 1963 and 1965 Sillman taught at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and after his departure from Yale in 1966, he held positions at the Rhode Island School of Design, the State University of New York at Purchase, and Ohio State University. He returned to Yale between 1973 and 1978 to teach advanced seminars.

Spanish Crossing is part of a series that abstractly represent doors, portals, and gates. The combination of colors, however, is the true subject here.

For many artists, drawing is a mnemonic aid in a much greater plan; plot lines to be dressed with the adornment of another medium. Not so for Sillman. His prolonged, patient dedication to drawing as his primary mode of expression elevated draftsmanship far above graphic design, reporting back from beyond the thermosphere with elegant and esoteric messages which compel us to stay and practice “seeing” more fully.  Sillman’ʹs paintings, however, are of another order. Though they clearly owe a debt to the carefull calibrate geometric abstractions of Albers, they are far less academic than the maestro’ʹs works. Albers repeatedly explored color through his iconic square motif, with an inexhaustible need to be didactic, creating signature paintings clearly intended for presentation to the world. By contrast, Sillman’ʹs color explorations are deeply personal and communicate a distinct appeal to the sublime. Some appear to be portals, to be entered by invitation only. Other paintings are crafted like textile designs with painstaking attention to detail, pattern, and composition. They are harbingers of the computer-assisted aesthetic that would surface several decades later in popular contemporary fiber arts.

Despite his characteristic reticence, Sillman was widely exhibited during his lifetime. He was included in “Recent Drawings, U.S.A.” at the Museum of Modern Art in 1956 and his works were handled by both the Stable Galleries and the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York City. He is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and theWhitney Museum in New York City, the Florence Griswold Museum and the Phillip Collection in Washington,DC.  Sewell Sillman died in Lyme, Connecticut in April, 1992.