Sidney Tillim (June 16, 1925 – August 16, 2001) was an American artist and art critic, known for his maverick painting and independent point of view on modern art in post-war America. Best remembered for his revival of history painting in the 1970s, Tillim alternated between the figurative and the abstract throughout his career. Likewise, although he wrote on a wide range of topics for Artforum and Arts Magazine, he is most identified with supporting representational art when few did. Early life and education 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). During the summers of 1946 and '47, he covered Piedmont League baseball for the Norfolk Ledger-Dispatch, which also published his baseball drawings. (He claimed the cartoonists Milton Caniff and Willard Mullin as early influences.) Tillim went to Syracuse University to study journalism, only to switch to fine arts after a year. He earned a BFA in painting and illustration, magna cum laude, in 1950. In college he became interested in representational and abstract artists: Ben Shahn, Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, the Cubists, and Piet Mondrian (especially in Mondrian's grids). After graduation, Tillim headed to California where he took a series of jobs as he painted, wrote poetry, and acted. In Monterey in 1952 he had his first solo show (abstractions) and published a chapbook of poetry, about which the Beat Generation poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote: "Here is a small collection of a painter's poetry.... He is not afraid to use strong language—if he sees dung, he names it. If his body is on fire, he says so. This is promising." In 1953 Tillim returned to New York, where he would establish his career. Painting Tillim had over twenty solo exhibitions and took part in many group shows throughout his career, from 22 Realists at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1970 and the 1972 Whitney Annual to the big 1992 Slow Art: Painting in New York Now at MoMA PS1, and more. 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). Tillim's first solo show in New York took place in 1960 (geometric abstractions and representational art). It wasn't until the mid-sixties that he began large narrative paintings of personal,