Jules Olitski; Times (UK) obit (painter)
Hyfler/Rosner
February 10, 2007
Jules Olitski
Abstract painter whose work ranged from sculptural impasto
to ethereal translucence - and back
Jules Olitski was virtually the stereotype of the artist
acting under compulsion. He accepted completely the vocation
of the artist as something imposed, almost as a punishment,
and insisted that the artist could rely on receiving no
special favours or status: "Were you asked to be an artist?
No one asked. Expect nothing. Do your work. Celebrate!"
Olitski was born in Snovsk, Russia, in 1922. His family
emigrated to the US the following year, and he was brought
up in New York, where he developed an early passion for
painting, attending art school there in the late 1940s. He
then spent two years studying in Paris - regarded as the
mecca for aspiring young American artists - in the early
1950. On returning to New York he found himself in the midst
of the Abstract Expressionist revolution, which suddenly
shifted the focus of interest in contemporary art to that
side of the Atlantic.
Inevitably, coming from a Paris preoccupied with the
"informel" in painting to the New York of Pollock, Gorky, De
Kooning, Still and Kline, Olitski first appeared on the
artistic scene as a freeform abstractionist. Initially his
art featured a heavy impasto, paint applied in great thick
patches, and in obedience, conscious or not, to the dictates
of the critic Clement Greenberg, the "subject", such as it
was, was removed from the centre to the edges of the
composition.
The heavily applied pigment proved to be a short-lived
phase. By the early 1960s he had moved away from his
preoccupation with circles and concentric arcs embodied in
an almost sculptural build-up of paint, towards deploying
similar forms in dyes and stains on canvas, and by the
middle of the decade his style had simplified itself in the
direction of pure colour fields, somewhat reminiscent of
Rothko, but with still the elements of pictorial incident
pushed to the margins.
Eventually it came about that actual brushwork, sometimes
quite bold and sharply defined, was kept exclusively to the
margins, the main part of the canvas being occupied by a
delicately articulated field of paint applied with a spray
gun. Olitski seemed to be seeking ways of making his almost
invariably huge canvases ever more ethereal and
insubstantial: indeed, at this time he told an interviewer
that his ideal painting would be "nothing but some colours
sprayed into the air and staying there".
He was rapidly acquiring a reputation as one of the leading
lights among American painters of the younger generation. In
1967 he had his first important retrospective, seen at the
Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington and the San Fran-cisco
Museum of Art, and in 1969 the polychrome sculptures he had
recently begun making were given an impressive solo opening
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
In 1973 he had another, more extensive retrospective, shown
in Boston and Buffalo before it arrived in New York at the
Whitney Museum of American Art.
During these years he taught consistently, first at Long
Island University, 1956-63, then at Bennington College,
Vermont, 1963-67. In the 1970s he took up print-making in a
big way, to such effect that a hefty catalogue raisonné of
his graphic work was published in 1989. And all the while,
his style gradually evolved, arriving by the end of the
century at a curious and entirely personal fusion of his
earlier, seemingly contradictory approaches to the putting
of paint on canvas.
Little by little he retreated from the ethereality of his
work in the 1970s, and began again to build up the pigment
until it took on almost a sculptural depth and complexity.
But at the same time he retained a degree of translucency in
his use of acrylic, so that the paint, frequently poured
instead of sprayed, seemed like a succession of veils, each
half-reveal-ing, half-concealing the layer beneath. The
result was a series of sensuously beautiful paintings,
frequently with vaguely biblical titles, which seemed to
invite the spectator to gaze into mysterious subaqueous
depths or try to penetrate beyond the stars.
His first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by
his third wife and two daughters from his previous
marriages.
Jules Olitski, painter, was born on March 27, 1922. He died
on February 4, 2007, aged 84