Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
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Ilya Bolotowsky was a fierce defender of the school of painting called neo-plasticism. His work in painting, sculpture, and murals was peculiarly his own. Its distinctive color was thought by some to resemble that of the Russian icons in Petrograd, where he was born in 1907.
His father was a lawyer, and his mother a graduate of the only college for women at that time. She held art classes afterwards continually, wherever they lived. The small family fled Russia during the Revolution, settling in Baku in the Caucasus, where Ilya studied law and was given drawing lessons by his mother. Then he attended a French school in Istanbul, where he took a course in art.
The family reached New York in 1923, and Ilya enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he was awarded prizes in drawing and a Tiffany Foundation scholarship in painting. At that time, Ilya said, the National Academy considered the use of strongly contrasting colors slightly evil. Nevertheless he attended for six years.
During the Depression he worked in the government-sponsored W.P.A. and did the first abstract murals to be executed in the United States. He taught at settlement houses, and at one time took over the directorship of the now legendary Black Mountain School for two years during the absence of Josef Albers.
He was drafted into the army in 1942, and served as a technical translator and interpreter for the Army Air Forces. After his army service, he was influenced by Joan Miró's biomorphic forms, then moved on to more geometric forms, and finally to a total commitment to neo-plasticism.
Ilya was a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, who included Balcomb Greene, Burgoyne Diller, George L. K. Morris, the sculptor Ibram Lassaw, and others. They met in Harry Holtzman's loft studio for discussions on their doctrine—which was opposed to biomorphic forms and which separated painters into two camps, on one hand the neo-plasticists and on the other the abstract expressionists, who considered the neo-plasticists' doctrine too constricting for free invention. Ilya moved freely within the boundaries he had chosen, and developed a unique style and palette of unusual richness.
He said his art was "based on the relationship of the right angle and of straight lines which result in rectangles." Associations, images, literature do not belong in this style. The aim is to realize a feeling of timeless harmony and dynamic equilibrium.
He made experimental films of a surrealist nature, films having some connection to a myth, either Greek or a myth he invented. One movie was of Marcel Duchamp, all alone in his studio, doing absolutely nothing, just occupying space. Ilya said Duchamp did this very well. Occasionally in the summer in Sag Harbor or East Hampton, he would show these films to his friends in his studio or the studio of a friend.
Public appreciation of Ilya's work was increasing rapidly at the time he was invited to join the Institute last year, but he was to miss the May 19 ceremony because of his tragic, untimely death.
Read by William Meredith at the Institute Dinner Meeting on November 10, 1982.