Taken together, the eight paintings in Sidney Tillim’s recent show comprise a sly, highly intellectualized challenge to our understanding of history and history painting. How successfully any one of the works might stand on its own is less clear. These are somewhat crudely executed, faintly Hopperesque exercises in a representational vein. They are primarily forceful as a group commentary on how we experience history in our daily lives. Some of them, such as David Cone’s No-Hitter (1999–2000) and Modern Crime, or The Death of Irene Silverman (2001), take their subjects directly from contemporary news stories. The others reimagine scenes from films: Chariots of Fire, American Beauty, and Johnny Guitar, among them.

A critic as well as an artist, Tillim at seventy-six seems to be playing a postmodern game, culling images (postmodern theorists would use the flat-footed term “appropriation&rdq ...

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