When it comes to matters of art, progress rarely takes a straight, clear, and single-minded path. Sewell Sillman’s career, however, suggests a different model—one that allows for stops and starts, for backtracking and bounding forward—in our consideration not just of Sillman as an artist but of his connection to the people, places, and events of art history. We can imagine this paradigm as a continuous, broken line. [1] That phrase, taken from an assignment Josef Albers gave at Black Mountain College in 1949, in which he asked his students to “draw a constant broken line,” is well suited to conceptualizing Sillman’s life’s work. While his tendency to build upon lessons from his teacher, Albers, and to push limits as he tirelessly evolved over the decades, emphasizes continuity with the past, he also made several definitive breaks over the course of his career. He fearlessly abandoned styles, media, and working environments when, in his assessment, they had run their course. “When Black Mountain was over, it was over; when Yale was over, it was over too, because things, attitudes dry up,” he stressed in a 1971 interview. “As soon as they codify, they dry up.” [2] Fine Arts Magazine 

 Evidence in Sillman’s oeuvre suggests that lessons from so-called “basic” design and drawing courses continued to occupy him through his final paintings. His persistent engagement with seemingly simple problems proves that they were not just hollow exercises to be carried out as an art student, but vital questions to be addressed again and again. Studying Sillman’s work, one can sense, as he called it, “the struggle to make people aware — which I had been made aware of by Albers — that you have to re-examine yourself constantly with these basic things.”[3]  In transmitting these fundamental concepts through his art and teaching, Sillman served as a critical link between the traditions of the 1920’s Bauhaus, as they were brought to the United States by Albers, between art and design programs of today. His life’s work takes its place along a continuous, yet broken, line in art and design history. 

Before enrolling at Black Mountain College, Sillman envisioned a career in architecture, a far cry from his family’s clothing distribution business. By the time he graduated from the Boys’ High School in Atlanta in 1940, the German, Bauhaus had been closed for seven years and its masters spread across Europe and America. His future mentor and Bauhaus faculty member, Josef Albers, was already ensconced in a new education experiment at Black Mountain College, near Asheville, North Carolina. After an unsatisfying stint in architecture school at Georgia Tech and a tour of duty during World War II, he applied to the Black Mountain School. One of Sillman’s letters of reference for Black Mountain College correctly summed up his situation: “At Georgia Tech Sewell is a misfit. At Black Mountain he will not be.”[4] 

Gaining Visual Authority

As a result of his experiences at Black Mountain College, described in Mary Emma Harris’s essay, Sillman decided to give up architecture in favor of the experimentation with color and line he learned in Albers’s classes. His close attention to Albers’s lessons, adapted from similar courses at the Bauhaus, and his devotion to Albers’s teaching methods primed Sillman for his endeavors later in life. The partnership Sillman and Albers formed at Black Mountain would eventually continue at Yale University, where Sillman developed into a visual authority trusted by many students and artists in the decades that followed his arrival there in 1951. 

 The transition away from Black Mountain left Sillman somewhat at loose ends. Albers’s resignation from the school in 1949 came unexpectedly to Sillman, leaving his at loose ends. “When Albers left it was just so empty,” Sillman recalled, “I stayed on but it was just death warmed over.”[5] After leaving Black Mountain, Sillman moved to Lenox, Massachusetts, where he taught at the Windsor Mountain School for one year. His sketchbooks from Windsor Mountain appear fairly continuous with the work he was engaged in at Black Mountain. “I was pretending I was still at Black Mountain,” he explained, going on in a whimsical style reminiscent of Paul Klee, another former Bauhaus master.[6] Klee-like abstract figures, landscapes, and architectural drawings dominate his surviving work. 

Though his art may not have evolved significantly with his move away from Asheville, his brief stint at Windsor Mountain advanced him in other ways. The progressive boarding school in the Berkshires gave Sillman his first opportunity to teach, an occupation for which he quickly developed a passion.[7]  In the meantime, Albers’s new position as the head of the design department at Yale, where a complete overhaul of the School of Art was underway, attracted Sillman to the Ivy League institution. Sillman applied to Yale in the autumn of 1950 and was able to enter, with Albers’s assistance, in the spring of 1951. Given his previous experience, Sillman’s course of study was accelerated and he earned his BFA in his first semester. He stayed on as a part of the MFA program, becoming Albers’s teaching assistant beginning in the fall of 1951. 

Sillman played a significant role in the transition the school was undergoing. Albers “needed help badly because he went into a very difficult situation,” Sillman recalled. “It was an academic situation in the tightest sense. They specialized in what they called the Giotto technique — the egg tempera technique. And he had to wipe out by himself a whole cast-iron tradition of art study.”[8]  Decades earlier at the Bauhaus, Albers had followed in the footsteps of other modern masters. At Black Mountain Albers began with a blank slate, but at yale, realigning the existing curriculum proved more challenging. Sillman quickly moved from acolyte to authority under that pressure. 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. 

Drawing without End

 When examining Sillman’s artistic production during his Yale years, from 1951 through 1966, it appears that he was greatly interested in exploring color in abstract ways. His color block paintings and later screenprints reflect his understanding of color interaction derived from Albers’s methods. He approached color in his paintings as an open-ended experiment, in much the same way as Albers’s own Homage to the Square series does. Sillman, however, concurrently developed a strikingly different side to his body of work during these years — one little studied until now. His graceful and enchanting calligraphic “wave drawings” owe their origin not to the color course at Yale, but to the design and drawing courses. 

 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 kind 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. One of the most basic lessons was to learn to draw and write simultaneously with both hands. Another had them drawing the back of an envelope from memory, rather than from observation. “The figure wasn’t very important,” Sillman asserted, “the figure wasn’t the end in drawing; there wasn’t any end in drawing.”[9] 

Sillman’s nearly fifty known wave drawings, most dated 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 arresting 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. 

The Business of Color

 Sillman remained at Yale until 1966, continuing to teach foundation design courses and upholding the school’s new artistic direction in the wake of Albers’s retirement in 1958. His relationship with Albers was far from over and, in fact, their most enduring work together was yet to come. When Sillman curated an exhibition of Albers’s work at Yale’s new art gallery building in 1956, he set upon a course that would occupy him for years to come: printmaking. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition contained two original screen prints from the Homage to the Square series made by Sillman and his soon-to-be partner Norman Ives in a basement studio at Yale. In 1962, Sillman and Ives, a fellow Yale professor and graphic designer, officially formed the art publishing firm of Ives-Sillman. The duo, who eventually partnered with Sirocco Screenprints in New Haven, 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 series of eighty screenprints illustrating the fundamentals of Albers’s color lessons with an accompanying text by Albers explaining the principles at work in each folio. The firm went on to produce additional works for Albers, along with portfolios and individual prints for noted artists such as Romare Bearden, Willem deKooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Ad Reinhardt, and Walker Evans. 

Trials & Errors

During the Ives-Sillman era, Sillman moved from New Haven to Lyme, Connecticut, putting some physical distance between his working world of screenprints with Ives and teaching and his private life and painting. While comfortably connected with the art world, Sillman could retreat to his Lyme home and studio, where he embarked on a period of “search,” an Albersian term that Sillman himself often used to describe visual experimentation—in this case, in the medium of watercolor. 

 Sillman’s new direction crystallized in the latter half of the 1970s, accompanied by major changes in his life.[10]  Josef Albers’s death in 1976 cut him off from further collaborations, but perhaps put him even more in demand as an educator. He returned to Yale for some advanced classes and criticism, and taught at many other schools, including the Rhode Island School of Design, University of Michigan, UCLA, the State University of New York and Parsons School of Design. Ives-Sillman dissolved after Ives’s death in 1978, though the final years were the busiest in their partnership. 

His foray into watercolor expanded Sillman’s formal vocabulary, setting him off on experiments in gradation, measurement, geometry, and scale. His tenacious approach to the search, in and of itself, was a product of his mentor’s influence. Sillman explained what he called the “question-question game,” as a useful, if sometimes frustrating, method of working. “If you throw out a question,” he explained, “the students come up with an answer. Albers taught us that it was all a question-question game. He gave us questions, which in turn we would find [more] questions. That’s it…. He didn’t help us find solutions to anything.”[11]  After several years of playing a solitary version of the “question-question” game, Sillman’s experimentation yielded fruit. In 1983, he culled through the products of his search and compiled a portfolio, which appears as a summary of thoughts and ideas over the course of eight years, and aptly titled the group “Trials & Errors.”[12] 

Sillman first confronted the orb shape in his later waves drawings and prints. He then dissected the orbs in works like, Pursuit #2, with an overlay of diagonal lines. He applied paint in precisely controlled washes within a rigid framework, creating optical illusions with intense color combinations. This format occupied his attention from 1975-81 when he broke with the motif, largely abandoning the orb thereafter. 

 Once he eliminated the orb, Sillman began to experiment with the remaining segments of the lattice, playing with the visual effects of the diagonals in very bright color combinations. What emerged after a year’s time was a simpler geometric shape, like a unit, or building block. The interlocking or braided shapes create the prevalent illusion of the feathers of an arrow lends a descriptive name —“flèche,” from the French for arrow — to these works.[13] 

Sillman quickly drained color from the predominantly gray and black flèche paintings, using it only sparingly in a few instances. These compositions took on the seemingly infinite task of seeking out the various possible arrangements of the flèche forms, breaking them down, flipping them over, moving them together and apart, all while playing an elaborate game with the stepped gradation of the diagonal bands that make up the flèche. 

The Goya of Grassy Hill

 Sillman created these tireless final searches in his home studio on Grassy Hill Road in Lyme, where the sounds of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and classical recordings often filled the air. The titles of many late watercolors reflect the classical themes coursing through the music he enjoyed. 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, 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. 

Sillman again reminds us that “the element of time is important” in his final series. His habit of noting start and end dates on his watercolors indicates not only an awareness on his part of the time devoted to each composition, but also a desire to mark the passage of time for the viewer as well. As the watercolor washes build up, the blacks become more and more intense. Black Caprice is perhaps the darkest and most solidly blocked watercolor of the late works and, correspondingly, took one of the greatest spans of time to complete, nearly seven weeks. The pace of his creative output slowed at this time. Sillman was completing works in weeks rather than days in the months before his death from cancer in 1992. 

 Years of experimentation and inquiry led him to hit upon his final major motif in the flèche paintings. Even with his advanced knowledge of color, design, and drawing, his formal vocabulary in the late works still includes, at heart, some of the essential elements evident in his earliest training. The final series is the embodiment of a crucial lesson Sillman learned over a lifetime’s work and one that he, in turn, taught to his own students. In observing more closely, revisiting or even reinventing an old problem, one can discover a new way of seeing, or a new level of meaning. It was, as Sillman called it, “basic soul study.”[14]  Sillman’s reluctance to wholeheartedly enter the broader commercial art world was a measure of his commitment to his art as a means of personal growth. “I’m less concerned about making art, or pictures, or belonging to any scene… I don’t really think that in 1947 I would have predicted isolation in a New England countryside as an end, though I doubt if it is.”[15] 

In his late work, a dark series that can appear particularly stark and painstakingly rational on first apprehension, Sillman’s presence is revealed. The culmination of a lifetime’s experimentation comes with an overtone of sadness, as with Beethoven’s late quartets, both profoundly intellectual and deeply personal. He sank into the dense black watercolor as he dealt, like the Goya of Grassy Hill, with age and illness, measures of time, and larger issues of human experience. 

by Amanda C. Burdan, Ph.D., George P. Tatum Curatorial Fellow, Florence Griswold Museum 

________________Footnotes___________________ 

1. A series of conversations with James D. McNair greatly helped in my understanding of Sillman’s life and art. His collection of art works, ephemera, and wealth of stories about Sillman provided essential support for this essay and exhibition. 

2. Transcript of Mary Emma Harris interview with Sewell Sillman, 7 March 1971, North Carolina State Archives (NCSA), Raleigh, N.C., page 32. 

3. Harris interview, 32. 

4. Letter of reference in Sewell Sillman’s application to Black Mountain College. NCSA. 

5.  Harris interview, 33. 

6.  Harris interview, 9. 

7. The extent of Sillman’s teaching responsibilities is unknown. Records of the Windsor Mountain School, which closed in 1975, were destroyed in a fire shortly thereafter. 

8.  Harris interview, 9, 10. 

9.  Harris interview, 6-7. 

10.  There are very few extant work from 1973 to 1977, which may be due to the obligations of printmaking and teaching, which required extensive travel. 

11. Harris interview, 39. 

12. A note to Sillman’s partner James D. McNair inside the portfolio is dated March 27, 1983. Its text reads simply: “Jim: I call these ‘trials & errors.’” Though collected together in 1983, two works from 1985 were later added to the group. 

13. The Sewell Sillman Foundation uses the term flèche in describing these works. Sillman titled one study in the Treasures portfolio Arrowheaded Variations. 

14. Harris interview, 26. 

15. Harris interview, 44.