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Sewell Sillman:
Pushing Limits

Pictures from opening...

February 13 through April 18, 2010

Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits is a groundbreaking exhibition of twentieth-century artist Sewell Sillman (1924-1992). In the late 1940s Sillman became a protégé of the Bauhaus Master Josef Albers at Black Mountain College, a hotbed of avant-garde activity in America. Sillman absorbed Albers’ approach to color, design, drawing and education over the decades of their work together, bringing Albers’ lessons to bear on his own art and teaching. The exhibition features Sillman’s graceful abstract drawings and watercolors alongside the powerful color studies created in collaboration with Albers.

As one-half of the art publishing team of Ives-Sillman, Sillman exercised his meticulous attention to technique in creating screen prints for many of the leading artists of his era. Portfolios he created for Ad Reinhardt, Frank Stella, Jacob Lawrence, and Piet Mondrian, attest to his technical mastery of color and screenprinting. Working proofs and documentary photographs, particularly those related to numerous editions created for Albers, emphasize the trust fellow artists placed in him.


An instructor for over 40 years at institutions such as Yale University, the Rhode Island School of Design, the University of Pennsylvania and UCLA, Sillman passed along on the lessons of Bauhaus drawing, design, and color to a younger generation of artists.

 

 

 

 

Known in the art world predominantly for his printmaking and color block paintings, Sillman kept a large body of work private for much of his career. This exhibition introduces his rarely seen early and late works, tracing his long term investigations devoted to exploring materials, expanding techniques, and developing a his personal formal vocabulary.

The Student

Founded in the fall of 1933 by faculty who had been fired or resigned from Rollins College in Florida, Black Mountain College, in Asheville, North Carolina, embodied the progressive ideals of the time along with educational ideas of classics professor John Andrew Rice. The basic principles behind the educational program were a close relationship between faculty and students, the abolition of academic bookkeeping (i.e., grades and quality points) as a measure of education, the integration of the arts into all aspects of community life, emotional maturity through life in a democratic community and a work program, and shared responsibility of both faculty and students for the running of the college.

When Sillman arrived in January 1948, the college had evolved into a vibrant, intense learning environment resembling in part a small liberal arts college, a farm school, a summer camp, and a religious retreat.

The campus was crowded with twenty-four faculty and eighty-seven students. European refugee teachers included Josef and Anni Albers in art and weaving, Frankfurt geometer Max Wilhelm Dehn, and physicist Natasha Goldowski, who had worked on the Manhattan Project. Among the young American teachers were M.C. Richards in literature and poet Charles Olson. Fellow students included Ruth Asawa, Ray Johnson, Kenneth Noland, Arthur Penn, Robert Rauschenberg, Kenneth Snelson, and Susan Weil.

It was Josef Albers’s classes that were to have a profound effect on Sillman’s life and work: “It was like suddenly discovering that I could use my hands, I could use my eyes.... It was like the baby in the crib recognizes its toes and its hands and begins to grab and explore with those things…. I had started all over again.... I had no idea what was going on.”

For Albers, design was a process, not an end product. It was about both form and the meaning of form. There were studies in size and proportion, illusion (the appearance of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional surface), paper folding and wire sculpture, lettering, proportion, symmetry and asymmetry, figure-background, and arrangement of elements, among others. Students wrote their names backwards and upside down, with their left and their right hands, to break habits and to develop eye-hand coordination and motor skills. It was primarily through the design course that Sillman realized that his interest was in the two-dimensional plane rather than three-dimensional form.

The Teacher

After Black Mountain College, Albers joined the faculty at Yale. Sillman became Albers’s teaching assistant there in 1951. He played a significant role in the transition the school was undergoing. His visual authority only grew when Sillman joined the Yale faculty after completing his Master’s degree, writing a thesis expounding upon some of the finer points of Albers’s color course.

To Sillman, Albers’s drawing class was as significant a step in his development as the color course he took over from his mentor. He described the course he taught at Yale as a composite of elements from Black Mountain’s basic design course and typical drawing exercises. Sillman remembered selecting the kinds of problems students “would need as a means to develop control of the pencil. It was how to give them more and more control over themselves.” For the students at Yale, accustomed to a more traditional academic course of study, the problems Albers and Sillman introduced were radical.

The Entrepreneur

In 1962, Sillman and Ives, a fellow Yale professor and graphic designer, officially formed the art publishing firm of Ives-Sillman. The duo specialized in creating high-quality screen prints for the art market, with Sillman personally mixing the inks, putting his years of color study into practice. The firm filled a void in the art publication industry with skillfully produced color reproductions of artworks that far surpassed the quality of typical lithographic color processes.

The team of Ives-Sillman quickly proved the superiority of their prints with an edition of Albers’s seminal Interaction of Color, a deluxe slip-cased portfolio published by Yale University Press. The portfolio contains eighty-eight folios of screenprints illustrating the fundamentals of Albers’s color lessons with an accompanying text by Albers explaining the principles at work in each folio. The edition of 1,800 sold out quickly when it was released in 1963. The firm went on to produce thirty-seven individual prints for Albers and six portfolios, along with portfolios and individual prints for noted artists such as Romare Bearden, Willem deKooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Ad Reinhardt, and Walker Evans.

The Artist

One of the very first problems Sillman recorded as a student in Albers’s design course at Black Mountain was to execute a “constant broken line or sine curve and to reproduce that line repeatedly.” The later wave drawings adapt this basic design principle by combining it with yet another of Albers’s lessons: “the element of time is important.” In demonstrating this concept, Sillman remarked in his Black Mountain notebook that a straight line exists outside of time. A line that is broken into dots and dashes forces pauses in the viewer’s perception. The line may even appear as a syncopation, controlling the speed and rhythm with which the line is read.

Sillman’s nearly fifty known wave drawings, most made between 1954 and 1964, exhibit both the constant broken line and the element of time. Sillman’s solution to these juxtaposed formal problems was a barbed line made by repeatedly stopping the movement of his pen or pencil and backtracking just a fraction of an inch. Each stopping point, and there are hundreds in a finished piece, is a moment of decision for Sillman, forcing him to carefully consider and choose the line’s trajectory. In the resulting drawings, Sillman’s barbed lines rhythmically echo one another, creating distortions of the picture plane. In their simplest form, the drawings appear to be made of fine thread stitched onto a diaphanous fabric. More complicated patterns call to mind a range of comparisons from the organic whorls of fingerprints to the natural formations of rock to ripples on the surface of water. In contrast to his paintings, which consist of calculated geometric forms precisely painted with a palette knife, these wave drawings depend upon the hand-drawn quality of Sillman’s line, making the artist ever-present, even in an abstract work.

His foray into watercolor expanded Sillman’s formal vocabulary, setting him off on experiments in gradation, measurement, geometry, and scale. He applied paint in precisely controlled washes within a rigid framework, creating optical illusions with intense color combinations. Even as his health began to fail in the later 1980s, Sillman conducted all of the instruments at his disposal, deftly controlling his brush, meticulously applying layer upon banded layer of watercolor in perfect gradation, and logically conceiving and executing the increasingly complex compositions on larger and larger sheets. As with the mathematics implicit in music, the calculations inherent in his late works transcend the rote exercises in design at their foundation, reaching a symphonic level with Sillman as maestro.

Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits will travel during the summer of 2010 to the Asheville Art Museum, a regional museum of American art with a longtime interest in presenting the arts of Black Mountain College. Our hope is that this project will break new ground by bringing public and critical attention to an artist and educator whose work richly deserves a fresh look.

1963 photograph of Sewell Sillman installing a mural based on his “wave drawings” in Paul Rudolph’s Art and Architecture Building at Yale University. Photo by John Hill, Collection of James McNair.

1972 photograph of the assmbley signing the Formulation: Articulation portfolios in the offices of Ives-Sillman, North Haven, CT. Pictured: Eugenia Joyce, Sewell Sillman, Josef Albers, and Norman Ives. Photo by John Hill, Collection of James McNair.

Sewell Sillman, Water Gate, 1960. Oil on masonite, 21 ½ x 21 ½ in. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of the Sewell Sillman Foundation

Sewell Sillman, Suspended, May 14-16, 1979. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 18 x 23 ¾ in. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of the Sewell Sillman Foundation

Sewell Sillman's Black Mountain College notebook, showing a lesson in writing with both hands at once, ca. 1948. Collection of James McNair

Sewell Sillman's Black Mountain College notebook, showing an exercise in mirror writing, ca. 1948. Collection of James McNair

Sewell Sillman teaching at Catholic University, Santiago Chile, ca. 1958-69. Collection of James McNair

Sewell Sillman, Untitled, ca. 1956-64. Ink on paper, 21 x 27 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of the Sewell Sillman Foundation

Sewell Sillman, 7, ca. 1956-64. Ink on paper. 19 x 24 in. Yale University Art Gallery, Gift of the Sewell Sillman Foundation

Sewell Sillman, Untitled, ca. 1956-64. Ink on paper 19 x 25 in. Florence Griswold Museum, Gift of the Sewell Sillman Foundation

Sewell Sillman, Untitled, October 10, 1980. Watercolor and graphite on paper. 18 x 24 in. Collection of James McNair

Sewell Sillman, The Seventh Visit: A Sketch, April 19-23, 1982. Watercolor and graphite on paper, 18 x 24 in. Sewell Sillman Foundation

Exhibition related events

EXHIBITION LECTURE

Saturday, February 13, 11am
Footprints in the Snow: Sewell Sillman at Black Mountain College
Mary Emma Harris, Director of the Black Mountain College Project

$7 (members $5) *
*does not include Museum admission

Join Mary Emma Harris, author of The Arts at Black Mountain College and co-author of the Museum’s catalogue Pushing Limits, as she recreates Sewell Sillman’s Black Mountain experience with Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and an avant-garde community of kindred spirits.

“Fully Awake” Hot Air Club Event

An Evening Inspired by the American Avant-Garde

Friday, March 5, 6:30pm
Fee: $35 (members $25)

Register Online

In celebration of the new exhibition, Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits, join us for an artful evening inspired by the avant-garde artists and writers of Black Mountain College who transformed American culture during the 1940s and 50s. Dress like an artist, try your hand at art and design exercises in the exhibition, and taste edibles and drinkables before screening the documentary about the impact that Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenburg, and others had on revolutionizing art in America. View Trailer

The Hot Air Club is generously sponsored by All-Pro Automotive, the Graybill Family; and Centerbrook Architects and Planners.

Sunday, March 7
2pm
Tell + Show Gallery Discussions (for adults)
with Amanda C. Burdan, Curatorial Fellow

Transforming the galleries into learning laboratories, Burdan both tells about Sillman’s distinct approach to color, line, and time with the work on exhibit as well as shows, using hands-on examples of Sillman’s creative lessons and artistic practices. This week, explore Sillman's earliest works. His whimsical use of line led him to develop a unique style of drawing. Learn how Sillman's “wave” drawings eventually formed the basis of experiments in textiles and sculpture.

FILM SCREENING

Wednesday, March 10, 7pm
Off-Site Screening at Connecticut College
(free to Connecticut College Staff and Students with ID)
Register Online

Thursday, March 11, 11am
On-Site Screening at Florence Griswold Museum
Register Online

Fully Awake: Black Mountain College
Cathryn Zommer, Filmmaker

$7 (members $5) *
*does not include Museum admission

Join documentary filmmaker, Cathryn Zommer for an introduction and screening of her film Fully Awake: Black Mountain College (2008), a new documentary film about the experimental college based in North Carolina from 1933 to 1957. Artists such as Sewell Sillman, Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenburg, and others, were impacted by the experimental and creative nature of the school. During its short existence the school significantly affected the American art scene, creating revolutionary new modes of music, literature, theater, and the visual arts. View Trailer

Sunday, March 14
2-4pm
Art + Design Labs for Adults

Experience the art lesson “problems” that Sewell Sillman practiced under esteemed teachers such as Josef Albers and later taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Black Mountain College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Test out color optics, intriguing drawing exercises, and time-based creative activities. Explore the brain-teasing drawing exercises that enhance motor skills and eye-hand coordination. This week, learn to write with both hands at once and create optical illusions with simple lines.

Sunday, March 21
1-5pm
*Art + Design Labs for Kids

Lines don’t have to be straight! Try your hand at making Sewell Sillman’s special wavy line and check out the funny swirls in our own fingerprints.

 

 

 

*SPECIAL DRAWING EVENT

March 27 through April 3
Included with Museum admission

The Hartman Education Center is the creative headquarters for Draw On! @ the FGM, a week-long celebration of drawing. Museum visitors and community members alike are invited to participate in a variety of fun and informative drawing activities. This drawing-based event is perfectly timed to coincide with two exhibitions at the Museum that feature drawings, Sewell Sillman: Pushing Limits and Drawing Practices.

Sunday, March 28
2pm
Tell + Show Gallery Discussions (for adults) with Amanda C. Burdan, Curatorial Fellow

Transforming the galleries into learning laboratories, Burdan both tells about Sillman’s distinct approach to color, line, and time with the work on exhibit as well as shows, using hands-on examples of Sillman’s creative lessons and artistic practices. This week, consider the ways in which Sillman marks time in his drawings and paintings.

Sunday, April 11
2-4pm
Art + Design Labs for Adults

Experience the art lesson “problems” that Sewell Sillman practiced under esteemed teachers such as Josef Albers and later taught at Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Black Mountain College, and the Rhode Island School of Design. Test out color optics, intriguing drawing exercises, and time-based creative activities. Explore the brain-teasing drawing exercises that enhance motor skills and eye-hand coordination. This week, recreate some of Sillman's exercises in making “fast” and “slow” lines and learn how you can paint time into watercolor.

Sunday, April 18
1-5pm
*Art + Design Labs for Kids

How fast can you draw? How slow can you paint? See what happens to our paintings and drawings when you try to speed up and slow down our art making just like Sewell Sillman did.