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."); A Dream of Being, 1969 ("A kind of history painting...of the psychological reality of our time....[It is] about the secular experience and the 'hero' of that experience—secular man."); Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper), 1970 (a breakthrough for him, Tillim would say later, in producing a narrative with conviction); Count Zinzendorf Spared by the Indians, 1972 ("I am using an earlier 'race' conflict to comment on the present one."); 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); and The Capture of Patty Hearst, 1978. In the sixties and seventies Tillim was represented by the avant-garde art dealer Richard Bellamy and by the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, a showcase for contemporary figurative art. During these years his important narrative and representational paintings were acquired for the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Mumok, Vienna (Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien); the James A. Michener collection at the University of Texas; and the Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina Greensboro. 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"). Another drawing for this series—The Song, 1970—is held in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. By the time figurative art became of interest in the art world, however, Tillim, once at the forefront of the trend, had returned to hard-edge abstraction. "The idea was just to paint pictures, not to make art.... [Bugs Bunny Meets the Sublime, Fair Shake, Jackhammer] are the climax of the first period (note the sizes of the pictures).... I intended a kind of humor though, even in the abstract, to deflate pretension. To make art is pretentious." 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). His narrative work in this short-lived style elicited some of the best reviews he would receive; while his totally abstract work would attract no attention for years. (In some quarters of the figurative revival, this embrace of