Jules Olitski; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
Hero of American modernism whose work fell victim to
changing fashion and was denounced as 'visual Musak'
Tim Hilton
Tuesday February 13, 2007
Guardian
Jules Olitski, who has died aged 84, was a lovely man and a
beautiful painter, celebrated as a hero of American
modernism from around 1960 to the beginning of the 1970s.
But his reputation sank at the time of his first major
retrospective, at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts in 1973,
and it will be for future historians to decide whether he
was a victim of the rise of conceptual art. Olitski himself
was not much troubled by criticism. As he often said:
"Nobody asked me to be an artist."
Olitski was born in Snovsk, Russia, though his father, Jevel
Demikovsky, was executed by the Soviet government just
before his birth. His mother, Anna, reached America in 1923
and married Hyman Olitsky. Her son took his stepfather's
name, though he loathed him.
There were elder stepbrothers in their small Brooklyn home.
"I was Cinderella in an all-male cast," was how Olitski
summed up these childhood years. When everyone was asleep,
he would go to the bathroom and read all night long. Playing
truant in the day, he would roam the outlying parts of
Brooklyn, where there were still chicken farms. On one such
excursion he met Sam Rothbort, an amateur artist who gave
him painting lessons and taught him to how to make black
bread. The Rothborts were Russian, too.
By 1935, encouraged by Rothbort, Olitski was attending art
classes in Manhattan. From 1940 to 1942, he attended the
National Academy of Design. For three years after that he
served in the US army, and in 1949 took advantage of the GI
Bill to study in Paris.
He worked with the sculptor Ossip Zadkine, and was impressed
by the art brut paintings of Jean Dubuffet. But Olitski
feared that his own work was inauthentic, and he took to the
unorthodox approach of painting while blindfolded - though
"every now and then, I would permit myself to peek." He
showed vehement paintings at the Americans in Paris show of
1951, and also had a one-man exhibition. Then he returned to
the US.
For eight years after 1952 Olitski held undistinguished
positions at art schools in New York state. His paintings
were impastoed, with crusty surfaces. In Late Madness of
Wentworth - Olitski liked to chuckle over his titles - a
weird pink struggles out of darkness. Such paintings
interested the critic Clement Greenberg, who became a close
friend and, at the end of the 1950s, included Olitski in
group shows alongside Barnett Newman, Morris Louis, Kenneth
Noland and David Smith.
Olitski changed his style in 1960-61. He poured and stained
paint into larger canvases. In Potsy, Yaksi Juice, Cleopatra
Flesh and Fatal Plunge Lady, he created areas of sharp,
intense colour. The use of acrylic paint had been prompted
by Noland, who, with Olitski, developed a manner known as
"post-painterly abstraction". This fresh-looking painting
was the first art movement of the 1960s. It was quickly
accepted by collectors and museums, and Olitski found he was
a suddenly famous and potentially affluent artist.
He had one-man shows every year from 1961 to 1965 at the
Poindexter Gallery in New York. He also exhibited at the
Kasmin Gallery in London in 1964, 1965, 1968, 1969, 1970 and
1972. There were exhibitions in Florence, Rome, Milan,
Paris, Toronto, Los Angeles, Washington and San Francisco.
He represented the US at the Venice Biennale in 1966, and
three years later became the first living American artist to
be given a one-man show at the Metropolitan Museum in New
York.
Olitski's many dealers worked hard for him. They were
rewarded with dozens - and then hundreds - of paintings, for
they were selling one of the most productive of postwar
artists. The canvases were numerous because of Olitski's
deftness, but also because he loved nothing better than to
be in his studio. He worked all night, got up at 2pm, then
started again. "I'm an addictive personality. It's like when
I drank. Enough was never enough."
Difficulties in Olitski's earlier years included alcoholism,
two divorces and many vicissitudes that come to a man whose
temperament belonged to downtown, bohemian Manhattan - or
his native Brooklyn - while his money was made near uptown
Central Park. In those days Olitski was sometimes uncertain
of his location, and was fortunate to survive car crashes
and other mishaps.
His studio was a blessing to a man who always wished to
believe in God. And tumults in his personal life were rarely
reflected in his art. Every canvas, however radical or
unusual, was perfect, often unworldly and consistently
serene. To judge between them was a matter of rarified
connoisseurship. Olitski often relied on a small group of
people to help him assess a group of paintings, or to alter
them. This led to a belief in the art world that he belonged
to a clique.
Certainly he was helped by friendship. David Smith, the only
abstract expressionist he knew personally, told Olitski he
was a great painter. From 1963 to 1967, when Olitski ran the
art department at Bennington College, Vermont, he gave
temporary posts to fellow artists. Among them were Noland
and the British sculptor, Anthony Caro. They formed an
avant-garde group whose discussions were often joined by
Greenberg, a friend to them all.
On one such occasion, talking with Caro in a Bennington
campus garden, Olitski suddenly thought of a painting that
would be as evanescent as sculpture was material. He began
to cover canvases with paint applied by a spray gun. The
surfaces, touched by no brush, became exceptionally
delicate. Colour now became pastel-like, and was revealed in
aerial swathes. The size of the paintings increased, so that
they could hardly be accommodated, except in a museum or a
prosperous new house. "They're visual Musak," said one
disgruntled critic.
From 1968 Olitski's paintings were produced with mops,
rollers and squeegees, as well as the spray gun. These
methods were widely influential. He also made large
sculptures from aluminium or from Cor-ten steel, which
weathers to a rust-like appearance. These pieces were often
ridiculed. Then came the 1973 Boston retrospective, almost
universally denounced by the art press. The public triumphs
of Olitski's career seemed to be over.
He still, however, had the respect of artists, who thought
him a giant of late 20th-century abstraction, and many
collectors too, despite his high prices. "Money is just
gravy." In 1973 he bought a house on an island in Lake
Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, which could be reached only by
boat. In 1978 he bought another house in the Florida Keys,
where he spent the winters. These homes were shared with
Kristina Gorby, whom he married in 1960 and who separated
him from the bottle. As usual, he painted all night long,
then amused himself with fishing and the intermittent
composition of a picaresque novel, autobiographical in
nature.
Olitski's most bizarre property was a former bank. It stood
like a concrete fortification in a dangerous part of
Brooklyn with barred windows through which nothing could be
seen. Inside, picnic meals were eaten on second-hand
furniture in the middle of the banking hall. Vodka was
provided, but only for guests.
The bank's vault held hundreds of Olitski paintings, dating
back to his days in Paris. Every now and then, one found a
masterpiece. The cataloguing was done by Lauren Poster,
Olitski's daughter by his second marriage. The artist
himself presided at these picnics, always with courtesy and
humour. He was a large man with a large face, and looked as
though he had known rough times. Yet his rambling
personality never lost its innate sweetness. He is survived
by his wife, two daughters from previous marriages, and a
stepdaughter.
· Jules Olitski, artist, born March 27 1922; died February 4
2007