(back to top)

Ary Stillman

Walpurgisnacht (Night of the Witches), 1946

oil on canvas

24 x 28 in.

Gift of Stillman-Lack Foundation

Learn More

Ary Stillman was born in Russia and attended the Imperial School of Art in Vilna before immigrating to Sioux City, Iowa at age 16.  He also studied at The Art Institute of Chicago and the National Academy of design in New York.  Stillman spent twelve years in Paris exhibiting at the Salon d’Automne and the Salon de Tulleries among other Parisian venues.  Stillman’s work turned to abstraction during the Holocaust when he became concerned with a deeper means of expression than representational art could offer. 

Walpurgisnacht is derived from various pagan spring rituals in which bonfires were built to keep away the dead.  In Germany it is the night when witches hold a celebration related to the arrival of spring.  It is said that Adolph Hitler and several members of his staff committed suicide on Walpurgisnacht, which may have been the impetus surrounding the choice of this subject for Stillman who portrays a chaotic scenes of agitated abstract figures around a fiery center.  The painting is indebted to the style of the famous Russian abstract artist Vassily Kandinsky whose lattices, grids, zigzags and wavy lines derived from dream imagery and music.  

Reference

Michael Betancourt, etal.  Ary Stillman: From Impressionism to Abstract Expressionism, Princeton, NC: Merrill Publishing Company, 2008. ISBN-13: 978-1858944333