Jules Olitski, 84, American Abstract Painter
Hyfler/Rosner
February 5, 2007 Monday
Late Edition - Final
Jules Olitski, 84, American Abstract Painter
BYLINE: By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO
Jules Olitski, a painter and sculptor who became a widely
admired and controversial member of the second generation of
American abstract artists, died yesterday in New York. He
was 84 and lived in Islamorada, Fla., and Meredith, N.H.
The cause was cancer, said his daughter Lauren Olitski
Poster.
Mr. Olitski rose to prominence in the 1960's as a leading
exponent of Color Field painting, an outgrowth of Abstract
Expressionism. With its emphasis on the visual properties of
paint applied to a flat surface, Color Field shies away from
illusions of depth and visible brushwork, instead prizing
the subtlety and expressiveness of swaths of pure color.
Treating the canvas as a broad, flat field, Mr. Olitski used
stain methods in the manner of Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland
and Helen Frankenthaler and later, unconventionally, a spray
gun. He once said that ideally his pictures should look like
''nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying
there.''
Mr. Olitski was a prolific artist, holding more than 150
one-man exhibitions worldwide. The formalist critics Clement
Greenberg and Michael Fried championed his work, and in 1969
he became only the third living artist to have a one-man
show at the Metropolitan in New York. His paintings are in
many museums, including the Met, the Guggenheim, and the
Modern in New York.
Mr. Olitski's brand of minimal, decorous abstraction was
briefly in vogue until Pop and Minimalism overshadowed it in
the 1960s. In the '70s, he moved toward more textural
painting and took up making painted metal sculpture. His
steadfast adherence to abstraction did little to endear him
to a succeeding generation in the art world, though his
constancy commanded respect. Later he achieved a kind of
fame as a long-neglected artist. Today, opinion about his
work is split. Some critics view it as an important late
development in American Abstraction and a precursor of
Minimalism, others as the empty gesturing of purely
decorative, painterly abstraction.
Mr. Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Ukraine a few
months after his father was executed by the Bolsheviks on
political charges. The boy escaped with his mother and
grandmother to the United States in 1923 and grew up in New
York. In 1926 his mother married Hyman Olitsky, and he
subsequently changed his surname. (The ''y'' became an ''i''
in 1951 when it was misspelled on a public announcement.) He
made art from an early age, training at the National Academy
of Design School and at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design,
both in New York, and later attending the Academie de la
Grande Chaumiere in Paris. In 1951, he held his first
one-man show, at Galerie Huit in Paris.
He returned to New York that year and continued his studies,
receiving a master's in art education from New York
University in 1954. He went on to teach at C. W. Post
College in Brookville, on Long Island, from 1956 to 1963,
and then at Bennington College in Vermont until 1967.
His first solo show in the United States, in the back room
at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in New York in 1958, won him
attention in the art world. There Mr. Greenberg admired his
work -- thick, impasto abstracts in the manner of Jean
Dubuffet and Jean Fautrier -- and subsequently became his
champion and friend. ''Olitski has turned out what I don't
hesitate to call masterpieces in every phase of his art,''
Mr. Greenberg wrote admiringly in the introduction to the
catalog for Mr. Olitski's exhibition at the 33rd Venice
Biennale in 1966, where Mr. Olitski appeared together with
Roy Lichtenstein, Ellsworth Kelly and Helen Frankenthaler.
As late as 1990, Mr. Greenberg described Mr. Olitski as
''the best painter alive.''
After representing the United States at the Venice Biennale,
Mr. Olitski had a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery
in Washington and, in 1973, a retrospective at the Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston, that traveled to three other museums,
including the Whitney in New York.
But by this time tastes had shifted, bewitched by Pop art,
and the show received less-than-favorable reviews. ''The
only paintings that Olitski has produced that remain of
interest are the more derivative color-field abstractions he
was producing in 1962-64,'' Hilton Kramer wrote in The New
York Times.
Mr. Olitski's first two marriages ended in divorce. He is
survived by his wife, Joan Olitski, known as Kristina; a
step-brother, Bernard Olin of Boynton Beach, Fla.; two
daughters from his previous marriages, Eve Olitski of West
Hartford, Conn., and Lauren Olitski Poster of Marlboro, Vt.;
a step-daughter, Natasha Cebek of Brattleboro, Vt.; and five
grandchildren.
Mr. Olitski continued to work and exhibit widely in his
later years, devoting himself to monotype (one-of-a-kind)
prints and sensual, emotive landscape paintings inspired by
sunrises and sunsets at his homes on Lake Winnipesaukee in
New Hampshire and in the Florida Keys. The reviews were
overwhelmingly positive.