Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1925, Sidney Tillim grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, where, as a young teenager, he twice won the Tidewater Marbles Championship (1938, 1939).

In 2002, a year after he died, Bennington College held a major retrospective exhibition, Sidney Tillim: A Life in Pictures (92 paintings, plus drawings and graphics).

[4] It wasn't until the mid-sixties that he began large narrative paintings of personal, historical, and current events, among them The Death of Malcolm X, 1965 (unfinished); Champion, 1966 ("It’s me," Tillim said of the knuckles-down marble shooter, "conceiving we are the heroes of our own existence.

"[6]); Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper), 1970 (a breakthrough for him, Tillim would say later, in producing a narrative with conviction);[7] Count Zinzendorf Spared by the Indians, 1972 ("I am using an earlier 'race' conflict to comment on the present one.

");[8] John Adams Accepts the Retainer to Defend the British Soldiers Accused in the Boston Massacre, 1974 (inspired by campus uprisings following the Kent State shootings);[9] and The Capture of Patty Hearst, 1978.

[14] The Art Gallery of Alberta acquired a suite of thirty-one drawings for Eden Retold (a series of paintings which Tillim based on the poem by Karl Shapiro, "Adam and Eve").

"[16] Tillim began the transition away from "straight" figurative art in 1979 by way of a Cubo-Expressionist style, as in An American Tragedy (the novelist Norman Mailer stabbing his wife at a party).

It was in 1987 that he accidentally kicked over a can of paint in his studio and proceeded to soak up the spill off the floor with a roll of paper towels.

[19] The imprints are large and colorful, energetic and elegant[20]—qualities that had been held in check by the labor of history painting (which could take months and in one instance, Tillim admitted, took years[21]).

[23] The brushworks are large abstract compositions, loose grids of shapes of dripping color that, as intimated in the title Approaching Majesty, Accepting Shame, are simultaneously "magnificent" and "disenchanted."

"[24] In his late period Tillim returned to narrative art, with images from popular culture—viz., movies, television, current events.

These include American Beauty, David Cone's No-Hitter, Modern Crime, or The Death of Irene Silverman (by Sante Kimes), The Women (the rapper Foxy Brown and the model Kate Moss), and others.

[25] What unites all his work is the postmodern combination of a deep affinity for ordinary American culture and colors with the traditions of art.

These could range from the stiff elegance and frozen detachment of the Italian Primitives whom Tillim admired—Fra Angelico, Piero della Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini—to the struggle and ambition of Cézanne.

[28] "He had the most individual turn of mind of anyone I knew in the world of art," wrote Philip Leider, the founding editor of Artforum.

Regardless, like the minimalist sculptor Donald Judd, who was his colleague at Arts, Tillim began to sense that criticism and the practice of painting were incompatible.

His last published piece, the photography exhibition review "William Henry Fox Talbot at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.," appeared in 2000 in Art in America.

[33] In spring 1973 Tillim was appointed visiting Charles A. Dana Professor of Fine Arts at Colgate University, where he debuted The Reception of President-Elect Washington by the Women of Trenton, April 21, 1789 (destroyed 1996)—a painting prompted by the disgraced presidency of Richard Nixon.

On the latter subject, he organized two exhibitions (with catalogues), one contemporary and one historical: 1) Photography Reproduction Production/ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation: Richard Artschwager, Ellen Brooks, Joseph Nechvatal, Mark Tansey, Andy Warhol (Bennington College, 1992);[35] and 2) with the photographer David A. Hanson, Photographs in Ink (Fairleigh Dickinson University, 1996).

[36] An historical survey of photomechanical printing, from early systems up to three/four-color letterpress halftone, such an exhibition was rare at the time.

[38]) His parents divorced in 1941 and, until he went into the Army, the teenage Tillim stayed with relatives in Brooklyn or in a boarding house with his errant father.

In college he was the sports editor for the campus monthly magazine, Syracusan, and won the Freshman Prize in painting (for figurative work).

Tillim's journals offer a rare look into the New York art world in the second half of the twentieth century by an insider with an "oppositional mind"[42]—a painter of not only figuration but also abstraction; a critic who wrote for important art magazines, cutting-edge and established; an artist who taught criticism at a college outstanding for its fine-arts curriculum; and an amateur collector who put together a museum-quality collection of specimens of 19th-century photomechanical reproduction.

Tillim's drawings and sketchbooks cover his entire oeuvre, and include preparatory studies for the major paintings.

There is also an atlas-size, limited edition portfolio, New York (16 prints by 16 artists), published in 1991 by Juni-Verlag, Germany, with graphic work by Tillim, Rudy Burckhardt, Joseph Nechvatal, Philip Pocock, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Hannah Wilke, et al.

In addition, the Archive holds works on paper by other artists, among them the children's book illustrator Marcia Brown, the muralist and printmaker Richard Haas, the minimalist Sol LeWitt (early figurative work), the contemporary artist Tom Sachs, the "lost generation" artist Henry Strater, and the sculptor Isaac Witkin; as well as a miscellany by various Bennington College art faculty (Kenneth Noland, June Leaf, et al.), from doodles drawn during faculty meetings and random sketches made of one another, to a life-size plaster head and face mask of Tillim.

Diderot in Hawaii, John Adams Accepts the Retainer to Defend the British Soldiers Accused in the Boston Massacre.

In: Photography Reproduction Production/ The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Representation: Richard Artschwager, Ellen Brooks, Joseph Nechvatal, Mark Tansey, Andy Warhol [exhibition catalogue].

David Cone’s No-Hitter, untitled abstraction [misidentified as Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime], The Departure of the Prince of Wales (watercolor).

In: A New History Painting by Sidney Tillim: The Reception of President-Elect Washington by the Women of Trenton [exhibition catalogue].