Jules Olitski
Russian-American Painter
Snovsk, Ukraine
New York, New York
Summary of Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski was a Russian-born American painter who was instrumental in the development of the Color Field school. Like his contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Olitski stained the surface of his canvases in a technique that rejected the gestural brushwork of the then-popular Abstract Expressionist artists. With their emphasis on material, surface, and color's emotional strength, his signature works eliminated the illusion of depth and any evidence of the artist's touch. Although Olitski did not remain as well known as some of his fellow Color Field painters, his abstract "spray paintings" of the 1960s are still considered landmark works of this movement.
Accomplishments
- Olitski was interested in conveying the evocative power of pure color. In his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, he rejected any suggestion of imagery or narrative, taking abstraction to its outer limits.
- Olitski pioneered a technique of applying paint to unprimed canvases with an industrial spray gun. He was thus able to show the paint at its airiest and most dematerialized, as though it were still floating in the air rather than fixed on the canvas. In this way, Olitski directed the viewer's attention to the essential qualities of color itself.
- The misty fields of paint in Olitski's signature works are remarkable for their subtle tonal gradations and their luminosity. Even in his later work, when he used heavy brushwork and a denser application of pigment, Olitski masterfully explored chromatic relationships and the interaction between color and light.
Progression of Art
Cleopatra Flesh
This "stain painting" exemplifies Olitski's early work as a member of the Color Field movement. To create its bold, simple composition, Olitski poured diluted paint onto a large canvas measuring nearly nine feet in height. The vibrant, unmodulated pigment has soaked into the fabric of the canvas; although there is no brushwork, the artist's hand is still evident in the carefully plotted arrangement of curved and circular shapes. Since the diluted polymer paints dried quickly, and no changes could later be made, the artist's handling of his medium needed to be skillful and purposeful.
Synthetic polymer paint on canvas - The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of G. David Thompson
Tin Lizzie Green
For the transitional works that fell between his early stain paintings and his well-known spray paintings, Olitski used rollers to apply very thin layers of paint to the canvas. This superimposition of colors resulted in varying effects of density - for example, the dark area at the top of the canvas where green overlaps red. The edges of the canvas were masked while the large fields of color were rolled onto the canvas. After uncovering those edges, the artist added a yellow streak to the left side and three colored dots along the right margin. This combination of techniques marked a newly experimental phase in his art. Olitski later remarked, "That the paintings I was doing with rollers, such as Tin Lizzie Green, would lead to the spray gun couldn't have been foreseen by me. But they did."
Alkyd and oil/wax crayon on canvas - Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Patutsky in Paradise
In his breakthrough works of 1965 through 1966, Olitski began using high-powered spray guns to apply paint to canvas. This technique produced seamless layers of sheer color that seem to flow into one another without any evidence of the artist's hand. In these works, Olitski's goal was to capture the effect of the pure color floating in the air, as though he were defying the limits of the two-dimensional canvas (and of gravity itself). The work's title refers to "Prince Patutsky," a nickname that Olitski's stepfather had given him in his childhood. Olitski used this name for several works of his works from the mid-1960s. Here, its juxtaposition with the word "paradise" and the painting's bright palette may indicate a feeling of pure joy, untethered to earthly difficulties.
Acrylic on canvas - Collection of the Art Gallery of Ontario
Rephahim Shade - 2
In the mid-1970s, to the consternation of his previous supporters, Olitski abandoned his spray guns and vibrant colors in favor of a monochromatic palette and broad, gestural brushwork. Although his work of this period remained abstract, its dark, earthy tones and expressive paint application were inspired by his love of such European Old Masters as Rembrandt and El Greco. The title includes a Biblical reference: "Rephahim" (or "rephaim") is an ancient Hebrew word for the "shadows" or "shades" of the dead. Olitski may have thought that his ghostly layers of lighter and deeper tones resembled spirits caught within a chaotic darkness.
Acrylic on canvas - Private Collection
Lives of Angels
In the later 1980s and early 1990s, Olitski reintroduced color into his work. Lives of Angels is painted in thick layers of iridescent acrylic paints. The shimmery gloss of the acrylic, in combination with the sweeping strokes of impasto, gives the completed painting a sense of movement and lush tactility. Olitski applied the paint not only with a brush but also with his own fingers (wearing a special mitt), so that his touch was literally present on the canvas. In some areas, the surface of the paint rises nearly an inch off the support. Despite an ongoing lack of support for his recent stylistic evolution, the artist was unrepentantly displaying his love of paint itself and of the play between color, light, and texture.
Acrylic on canvas - Olitski Family Estate
With Love and Disregard: Rapture
At the age of 78, Olitski painted a well-received series of paintings named With Love and Disregard (2002), in which he came full circle to the vivid colors and curvilinear forms of his 1960s Color Field canvases. However, the result was now raw and elemental, with crackled surfaces and harsh contrasts. During these late years, Olitski worked in a studio on Bear Island in New Hampshire's Lake Winnipesaukee. Bear Island's rocky shore and dense forests, and its dramatic views of sunset and sunrise on the water, doubtlessly inspired Rapture's deliberate roughness and its juxtaposition of burning bright golds with deep blacks and blues. Once again, the artist had fearlessly combined his "love" for his medium with a "disregard" for the rules of art-making.
Acrylic on canvas - Private Collection
Biography of Jules Olitski
Childhood
Jules Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Snovsk, Russia (now Ukraine), on March 27, 1922. His Bolshevik father was executed by the White Russian army a few months before his birth. In 1923 his mother and grandmother brought him to the United States, where the family started a new life in Brooklyn, New York. His mother remarried in 1926, and he took the surname of his mother's new husband, Hyman Olitsky. He changed the spelling of his name later in life after it was misprinted in a clerical error.
Early Training
Olitski showed an early talent for drawing and began taking art classes during his teens. In 1939 he won a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1940 to 1942 and also took classes at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design on Manhattan's East Side. After becoming a United States citizen in 1942, he was conscripted into military service for three years during World War II. Although he never served overseas, he lived in Paris from 1949 until 1951 and was able to attend the Ossip Zadkine School and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere through the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill. His first one-man exhibition was held at the Galerie Huit in 1951.
Olitski moved back to New York in 1951 and began studying at New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and a Master of Arts in Art Education in 1954. In 1956 he took a position as the head of the Fine Art Division at C.W. Post College of Long Island University, where he taught for seven years.
During this time, Olitski began to receive recognition as an artist in New York. He exhibited at Iolas Gallery in 1958, and in 1959 he held his first one-man show in the city at the gallery French & Co., where the renowned critic Clement Greenberg was a consultant. Greenberg became Olitski's steadfast champion and guided his career to its zenith.
Mature Period
At the time he was discovered by Greenberg, Olitski was creating monochromatic canvases in an Abstract Expressionist idiom influenced by older painters like Hans Hofmann. However, he soon began experimenting with a variety of media and new techniques. By the late 1950s, the gestural abstraction of the New York School was being challenged by a group of younger artists who reacted against the heavy impasto and distinctive brushstrokes of Action Painting. They sought to remove the illusion of depth and any evidence of the painter's hand in a style dubbed "post-painterly abstraction" by Greenberg.
Olitski, along with his colleagues Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Morris Louis, was one of the pioneers of post-painterly abstraction. These artists shared certain techniques, such as a method of staining the canvas by pouring quick-drying acrylic pigment directly onto it. Olitski's experiments with stain painting can be seen in works like Cleopatra Flesh (1962), which features the bright colors and large, simplified shapes that mark his work of the early 1960s. During the mid-1960s, however, Olitski abruptly changed his method. In 1964, in works like Tin Lizzie Green (1964), he began using rollers to press paint into the canvas in wispy, superimposed sheets of uninterrupted color.
Olitski's most important breakthrough came in the spring of 1965, when he began using industrial spray guns to apply diaphanous layers of paint to unprimed, unstretched canvas. This process was groundbreaking. It removed all vestiges of drawing and of the artist's hand. It was considered by some critics, including Michael Fried in his introduction to Olitski's 1967 show at the Corcoran Gallery, to be the apotheosis of the Color Field movement because it "[made] possible the interpenetration of different colors, the intensity of each of which appears to fluctuate continuously." Fried went on to say that this interpenetration and fluctuation created a new visual experience in modern art: "by atomizing color Olitski has atomized, even disintegrated, the picture surface as well." This elimination of depth and new understanding of the picture surface illustrate Olitski's own goal for his paintings to resemble "nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying there." These works of the mid-1960s, such as Patutsky in Paradise (1966) were praised by critics and are still considered the most important of Olitski's career.
By this time Olitski had become a major player in the New York avant-garde and was chosen to represent the United States, along with Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Roy Lichtenstein, at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. In the introduction to the catalogue, Greenberg heaped praise upon Olitski, calling his paintings "masterpieces." Olitski's star continued to rise throughout the late 1960s. He was the subject of a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in 1967, and his sculpture was showcased in a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. In New York, his circle of close friends included the painters Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons and the sculptors Anthony Caro and David Smith. He also spent time in Vermont, teaching art at Bennington College from 1963 to 1967.
However, in the early 1970s Olitski changed his modus operandi yet again and began applying paint in a thick impasto that harkened back to the gestural abstraction of his predecessors. Although he was the subject of a major retrospective organized by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1973, the tide of critical opinion began to turn against him. Post-painterly abstraction had been challenged by Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art; however, Olitski continued to paint as he liked, regardless of these newer movements. His persistence drew harsh reviews from critics like Hilton Kramer, who wrote that, in the 1973 retrospective, "the only [works] that remain of interest are the [ones] he was producing in 1962." Equally negative critical response to his forays into sculpture relegated Olitski to the sidelines of the American avant-garde. The decline in Olitski's stature among other critics and his younger peers was most likely only hastened by Greenberg's continued assertion, which he maintained until 1990, that Olitski was the best living American painter. His dedication to a fixed set of artistic ideals had apparently turned out to be a dead end for his career.
Late Years and Death
During the two decades following his 1973 retrospective, Olitski's work was infrequently included in major exhibitions, and his sales saw a severe downturn. However, undeterred by this change in public and critical taste, he continued to experiment. His brushwork became increasingly dynamic and his paint application even heavier as he moved from a grisaille palette to brighter tones with iridescent finishes. His embrace of depth and movement during this period has caused his work of the 1980s and early 1990s (such as Lives of Angels [1990]) to be described as "baroque" by later art historians and critics.
Olitski's paintings of the later 1990s were inspired by landscapes near his summer home in New Hampshire and his winter house in the Florida Keys, This return to the depiction of the natural world was a major departure from a career that had avoided any recognizable imagery in favor of pure abstraction. He also became interested in printmaking and in watercolor painting, and he devoted a great deal of his time to these media. As he had done throughout his career, he preferred to paint throughout the night and sleep late into the day.
In the last decade of his life, Olitski began a final series of vivid, forceful abstractions titled With Love and Disregard (2002). When this series was exhibited in New York in 2002, it received many positive reviews. Olitski painted until his death from cancer in 2007 at age 84. He was survived by his third wife, Joan (known as Kristina) Olitski, as well as two daughters from his previous marriages and a stepdaughter.
The Legacy of Jules Olitski
In the 1960s, Olitski took part in defining Color Field Painting and post-painterly abstraction. Over the following decades, he continued to challenge artistic conventions. His ever-changing style and techniques made him difficult to categorize, and for a long while he was eclipsed by contemporaries (like Frankenthaler and Louis), who had maintained a consistent aesthetic. However, despite the unfavorable reception of his work in the 1970s through the 1990s, Olitski stood firm in his commitment to wide-ranging experimentation with the interplay of color and light, pictorial space, and the expressive potential of his chosen medium of paint. When he exhibited his final works, in the last years of his life, public and critical tastes had begun to shift again, this time in his favor.
Olitski's art continues to be exhibited in galleries worldwide, and he is represented in major museum collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tate. In 2011 Olitski was the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, which traveled across the United States and was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. This recent reexamination of Olitski's career has confirmed his importance as a mid-century abstractionist and his influence on a younger generation of abstract painters.