abstraction would earn him life-long enmity.) As a consequence, in the mid-1980s when there were no commercial showings of this work, Tillim was challenged multiple times by the Internal Revenue Service on his claim to the profession "artist" (vs "teacher/ critic," with "artist" relegated to the category of hobby). Tillim prevailed in every audit. Tillim's representational art had developed in the socially and politically unstable sixties and seventies; while his experiments in abstract art occurred at the time conservatism took hold in the eighties and nineties. 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. The saturated toweling inspired him to imprint the sheets directly onto the canvas. He had stumbled upon a process that made concrete his ideas about reproduction, repetition, fabrication, and postmodernist art. The imprints are large and colorful, energetic and elegant—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). In 1992 Tillim started rubbing opaquing film (Korectype) on paper, scraping the film with his fingernails, brushes, scissors, etc. "Korectype appeals to me as a medium because it is both mechanical and manual at once. With it one makes a mark that is personal and impersonal—surprising and finished, a unique copy in fact." Then in 1993, feeling he had taken these experiments as far as he could, Tillim resumed painting with brushes. 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." This new work took Tillim away from issues of perception and mechanical reproduction, inherent in the imprints, and brought him back to "painting about painting." 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. 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