Francesca, Andrea Mantegna, Giovanni Bellini—to the struggle and ambition of Cézanne. "Banality represented under the proper art historical, stylistic conditions is the only credible source of art beauty in late twentieth-century art," avowed Tillim. "If there's not an element of the banal, of the ordinary, even the 'kitschy,' it's not for me." Tillim's last exhibition was eight 'banal,' 'ordinary,' 'even kitschy,' contemporary history paintings. The show, Sidney Tillim Recent Paintings, took place in 2001, four months before the artist died, making it perforce—much as is the painting Johnny Guitar, or To Stay or To Go—his "poignant moment of leave taking." In painting Tillim was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Grant, Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, Yaddo Fellowship, and Ingram Merrill Foundation for the Arts Grant. In Summer 1992 he was a Resident Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. Art criticism Tillim's studio practice informed his critical thinking. "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. Tillim, one of Leider's early East-Coast hires, was a contributing editor from 1965 to 1970. He wrote nineteen articles for the influential magazine, including "The Figure and the Figurative in Abstract Expressionism" (1965); "Philip Pearlstein and the New Philistinism" (1966); "Gothic Parallels: Watercolor and Luminism in American Art" (1967); "Earthworks and the New Picturesque" (1968); "A Variety of Realisms" (1969). Before moving to Artforum, Tillim had been a prodigious reviewer and contributing editor at Arts Digest/ Arts/ Arts Magazine, where Hilton Kramer was editor. From 1958 to 1965 Tillim wrote as many as fifty exhibition reviews a month. 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. After leaving Artforum, Tillim stopped writing for commercial publication; when he resumed, fourteen years later, he free-lanced as an occasional contributor to American Craft, Art in America, Artforum, and Arts. His last published piece, the photography exhibition review "William Henry Fox Talbot at Hans P. Kraus, Jr.," appeared in 2000 in Art in America. Before his death, Tilllim was gathering material for a book on the art critic Clement Greenberg, whom he considered the most important influence on his own criticism. (Tillim had portrayed Greenberg, a long-term friend, in 1969 in the painting Who Among Us Really Knows?)