St. Louis Museum of Art
Ary Stillman
July 2-?, 1929
St. Louis, Missouri

Around the Galleries

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.

City Art Museum Displays Work of H. Ary Stillman

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.