Lamentation (for Kate Houskeeper)

Sidney Tillim was a painter and an art critic. Himself a proponent of figurative painting, he is even better known as its theoretical spokesman. Until 1970, Tillim regularly wrote for the art magazine Artforum under the by-line “the figurative guy”. Tillim’s realism harks back to the art historic past; his is a realism born of nostalgia. As he has said of himself, his aim is to breathe new life into lost ideals and bvring back the lost quality into art. His work consistently draws inspiration from art history’s rich treasure house, appropriating composition, iconography and motifs of past epochs and reviving them to address contemporary issues. In his monumental “The Lamentation of Kate Housekeeper”, the artist stages the death by accident of one of his students as a mundane paraphrase of Christ’s passion. Using the iconography of the lamentation of Christ as his foil, Tillim arranges his otherwise thoroughly modern figures in a Raffaelesque triangular composition. His style is characterized by strong volumes and clear contours, emulating the monumental statuesqueness typical of early Renaissance painters’ fresco figures. The direct model for the kneeling figure behind Kate Housekeeper is an antique greek "Cowering Venus" which in the Renaissance became an oft-quoted motif.