Jules Olitski by Yares Art

JULES OLITSKI

JULES OLITSKI CO LO R TO THE COR E PA I N T I N G S : 1 9 6 0 – 1 9 6 4

NOVEMBER 7, 2020 – JANUARY 30, 2021

YARES ART

745 Fifth Avenue New York, New York 10151 (212) 256-0969 www.yaresar t.com

CONTENTS 7 Olitski at the Core: An Introduction David Ebony 13 The Sticky Spring Leaves, the Blue Sky Alexander Nemerov 19

“ A Curious Painting is Taking Shape”: Jules Olitski’s Ludic Surfaces, 1959–1964 Patricia L Lewy

92 Jules Olitski Chronology Alex Grimley 108 Exhibition History 114 Bibliography 120

Catalogue of the Exhibition

123

About Jules Riva Yares

Necessary Light

1959

Acrylic on canvas

80 ½ x 68 ½ in. (204.5 x 174 cm)

Private Collection

O L I T S K I AT T H E C O R E : A N I N T R O D U C T I O N B Y DAV I D E B O N Y As we approach the centenary of Jules Olitski’s birth, a new assessment of his formidable artistic achievements is in order. Today, his work appears fresh, vital, and more astonishing than ever. Art-world observers recognized Olitski’s prodigious talent early on, in the mid-1950s, with the critically well-received first shows of his “Spackle” paintings—moody, somber-toned, highly textural, abstract works. However, Olitski’s preeminence—not to say, genius—as one of contemporary art’s great innovators was first evident in the “Core” series of large-scale, brilliantly hued, abstract stain paintings created with Magna, water-based acrylics, and dyes during the early 1960s. The series began with striking compositions such as Necessary Light (1959, Pl. p.6), and Fanny Dimes (1960, Pl. p.10), in which brightly hued irregular circles or cellular shapes glow from within dark backgrounds. Sixty years later, brought together as the focus of the present exhibition at Yares Art, these and other major works from the period still deliver a remarkable level of visual excitement, and also offer intellectual challenges to further the possibilities of abstract painting today. In the “Core” paintings, Olitski poured passages of translucent, unmodulated color onto great swaths of unprimed canvas—a technique pioneered by Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Olitski’s friend and colleague, Kenneth Noland. Graphically potent with crisp biomorphic shapes, the “Core” compositions—physically imposing in terms of scale—were quite unlike anything seen before. The works employ a limited lexicon of spare, mostly irregular circular forms, and, of course, the saturated, radiant hues that distinguish Olitski as one of the most adventurous colorists of his time. In each work, the muscular physicality of the design complements the searing, metaphysical color. Paintings such as After Five (1961, Pl. p.34) and Cleopatra Flesh (1962, Pl. p.54), with embracing circles and ovals in blue, red, green, and black, seem to result from a few spontaneous and emphatic gestures, with a rightness of touch and tone that recalls a Zen master’s

moment of unhesitating perfection. The works caused a stir from the outset. In 1961, while still in his thirties, Olitski won the prestigious second prize at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (now known as the Carnegie International) for Osculum Silence (1960), which was subsequently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In related works, such as Fanny D (1960, Pl. p.12)—one of the earliest “Core” pictures—and Circle Stretch (1963, Pl. p.61), the rhythmic play of line, as well as the voluptuousness of the rounded forms of disembodied color, allude to the figure (abstracted limbs and heads), just as Olitski’s late abstractions frequently allude to land- or seascapes.The “Core” compositions also suggest dynamic movement—specifically dance and choreography, which were of special interest in later years, specifically in relationship to his sculpture.1 While the circular forms recall Abstract Expressionist works, such as those by Adolph Gottlieb and the iconic Color Field circles of Noland, Olitski often cited in interviews the work of modernist masters Paul Klee and Joan Miró as major sources of inspiration. Klee’s Ad Parnassum (fig.1), for instance, featuring an eccentric, abstract space constructed with tiny mosaic-like facets of color, complete with a glowing orange orb in the upper right, would certainly appeal to Olitski’s sensibility. The formal similarities between a Miró composition like Painting (The Magic of Color), (fig.2), and such Olitski works as Lucy’s Fancy (1960, Pl. p.17) or Fair Charlotte (1961, Pl. p.39) are even more readily apparent. In each work, two ovals in contrasting colors vie for dominance of the picture plane, releasing a palpable energy or tension like “two centers of energy coping with each other,” as art historian Rudolf Arnheim describes the interaction of abstract forms in his book The Power of the Center. “Compared with the circle,” he writes, “the oval pays with a loss of centric symmetry for an increase in tension.”2

Fig.1 Paul Klee. Ad Parnassum, 1932. Oil on canvas, 39 x 50 in. (100 x 126 cm). Collection of Kunstmuseum Bern, Switzerland. Fig.2 Joan Miró. Painting (The Magic of Color)/ Peinture (La magie de la couleur), 1930. Oil on canvas, 59 1⁄8 x 88 5⁄8 in. (150.2 x 225.1 cm). The Menil Collection, Houston.

Fig.3 Ossip Zadkine. Venus, ca. 1922–24. Acacia wood, 75 ½ x 21 x 18 ¼ in. (191.8 x 53.3 x 46.4 cm). Collection of Tate Modern, London, UK.

Fig.4 Rembrandt van Rijn. Danaë, 1636. Oil on canvas, 73 x 80 in. (185.4 x 203.2 cm). Collection of the State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Early on, Olitski’s champions and biographers, including Kenworth Moffett, drew comparisons between Olitski’s “Core” paintings and his life drawings of female nudes that the artist returned to periodically throughout his career. The curvaceousness of Olitski’s abstract forms in this series may find their counterparts in the lithesome outlines of breasts and torsos in his drawings of nudes. Having begun his career as a figurative painter, Olitski felt it important to retain this subtle connection to the human form. The association with figuration that he maintained on some level also helped to counter the potential didactic implications of the purely abstract works, for which he was, and is, renowned.To my mind, Olitski’s abstractions always convey an epic, romantic sweep that is usually associated with figurative paintings of the Old Masters. He studied life drawing, painting, and sculpture from the late 1940s through the early ’50s with Chaim Gross in New York, and briefly with the Russian-born French artist Ossip Zadkine in Paris. While classic Zadkine works, such as the highly stylized wood sculpture Venus (fig.3), certainly made an impression on the young artist, he found his teacher’s chauvinistic attitudes unbearable. Zadkine’s belief that Americans were incapable of creating anything of true aesthetic value irritated Olitski. This experience could have reinforced the subtle but steadfast affinity for figuration that constantly engaged him, even as his most innovative experiments with abstraction evolved. Above all, Olitski regarded Rembrandt as his master. “I still look at Rembrandt in terms of his art as a very pure visual art,” Olitski noted. It is “the kind of an ideal of pure painting that I try to achieve in my own terms.”3 The sensuous line, pure luminosity, and graceful comportment of the nude figure in Rembrandt’s 1636 Danaë (fig.4), for example, were qualities that Olitski sought in his own work. Among the modernists, Henri Matisse led Olitski not only toward experiments with novel color and spatial relationships, but also to the kind of sumptuous, curvilinear forms that suffuse the “Core” series. The sensuous line, lush color, and the overall spatial ambiguity of a Matisse composition such as Large Reclining Nude (fig.5) are reflected in Olitski’s major abstractions of the period. A number of these works, incidentally, include feminine names or references in their titles, such as Dream Lady (1963, Pl. p.64), Queen of Sheba Breast (1963, Pl. p.74), and Miss Yellow Gorgophone (1964, Pl. p.90). These paintings share a particular light or luminosity, as well as the idiosyncratic way that the rounded forms, or orbs, glow from within the ethereal space. The “Core” series features color relationships that anticipate those in the later “Spray” paintings, as well as in Olitski’s sculptures. The monumental scale of the “Core” paintings, the centrifugal force they convey as the forms press toward the edges of the compositions, also anticipates the later “Sprays.” In addition, a consistent sensuousness in the colors and forms in the stain paintings connect them directly to the drawings of female nudes that Olitski produced at the time. As Kenworth Moffett and other observers have noted, the curvilinear shapes in the “Core” works recall the female forms that Olitski rendered in his drawings of nudes.4 The only time I met Jules Olitski was in the late 1970s, when I went to his downtown studio to return one of his female nude drawings that had been included in a group show of nudes at Harold Reed Gallery (figs.6 and 7), on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where I worked at the time—one of my first jobs after college. Olitski himself answered the door and was quite cordial. We spoke briefly about the drawing. I mentioned that I was surprised by the nude figure drawing, as I was familiar only with his abstract works, which I admired. It was not an in-depth discussion, but he gave a short, insightful response to my comment. In those few words, he made me aware that this sensuous quality inherent in the drawing can be found in all of his abstract paintings as well. It was something of a revelation for me. I have felt the special sensuousness in Olitski’s color, forms, and textures in all of his works ever since. 1. See Jules Olitski’s remarks on his sculptural dance floor design for Harvard University in Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olitski (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 227–228.

Fig.5 Henri Matisse. Large Reclining Nude, 1935. Oil on canvas, 26 x 36 1⁄5 in. (66 x 92 cm). Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art.

2. Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1988), 89–91. 3. Interview with Olitski by Judith Dayton, included in Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olitski, 200–224. 4. Ibid., 38.

Fig.6 Jules Olitski. Seated Nude, Back View, 1965. Crayon and pencil on cream textured paper, 11 5â &#x201E;8 x 18 in. (29.5 x 45.7 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski. Fig.7 Jules Olitski. Nude Lying on Back with Left Leg Bent Up, 1966. Pencil on print (verso), 12 x 17 in. (30.5 x 17.8 cm). Private Collection.

Fanny Dimes

1960

Magna acrylic on canvas

80 x 68 in. (203.2 x 172. 7 cm)

Collection of David and Marla Susser

Potsy

1960

Magna acrylic on canvas

80 x 68 Â¼ in. (203.2 x 173.4 cm)

Private Collection

Fanny D

1960

Magna acrylic on canvas

89 x 89 Â½ in. (226.1 x 227.3 cm)

T H E S T I C K Y S P R I N G L E AV E S , THE BLUE SKY B Y A L E X A N D E R N E M E ROV

Jules Olitski’s paintings of the early 1960s aspire to make new worlds. The way they do so has to do with painting itself. Take the huge picture called After Five (1961, Pl. p.34), a vast expanse of midnight blue dominated by a circle of vermilion and green. On the wall, the painting is so big and sensuously overwhelming that the artist seems bent on blotting out all that’s outside it. An adjacent picture on another wall, a conversation in the next room, the sounds of the street outside—all would disappear, muffled, in this other reality made by colors and shapes. What recompense does that alternative aesthetic world offer? The conventional answer is that it removes us from the inevitable conflict and confusion of any given social moment. All too aware of our imperfections, our cross purposes, our powerful disagreements, the painting transcends disaster and sorrow, transcends also ordinary earthbound happiness, to create a feeling a person scarcely knew they could access. That other world would be religious. It would make zones of weighted weightlessness, floating sensations of gravity. The circle of brilliant red and green is light as air yet imposing on the wall. It makes a “massive calm,” to use a phrase of Clement Greenberg, Olitski’s great critical champion and discoverer.1 No ribbons and strips of tattered color, no storm bursts of expressive emotion—just an inevitable and overwhelming clarity, as of heavenly heroes and heroines whose deeds are done, who make a firmament heavy in the heavens. Hung one next to another, Olitski’s paintings of the early 1960s—Circle Stretch, Fanny D, Lucy’s Fancy (Pl. pp.61, 12, 17)— assemble like Michelangelo’s Sibyls and Prophets on the Sistine Ceiling. At the same time there is something jocund and playful about these balloons. The clown colors and even clown faces of Free Spirit, First Pull (both 1963, Pl. pp.60, 63), Yellow Juice (1961, Pl. p.35), and other Olitski paintings of this period call to mind the circus and carnival. The big top offers an alternative world of buoyancy and laughter, a replacement for the one we live in. There is no vista outside the tent, no one but the jester on the unicycle, just the zany circularity of this separate reality that proposes itself as an enthralling though temporary substitution for the grim one outside. Not that the separate aesthetic world is a free-for-all of joy. The terror of it—the overwhelming brightness, the saturation of the colors, the

imposing physical dimensions of Jovian laughter—is not lost on Olitski. His paintings strike like the thunder of the bowling pins knocked down by the mountain sprites in Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle.” The boisterous spirits of higher realities rebound down the mountain like the boulders that Olitski’s shapes resemble. Unnerved, we scatter before this outsized mirth. Yet we come back, peering tentatively at these cosmic bursts that suggest worlds beyond us. Even if we begrudge Olitski his self-appointed role as hurler of the lightning bolt, wondering why he should anoint himself a god, we cannot argue with this manifestation of the age-old Promethean myth. The artist who steals fire from the gods remains a durable story, a necessary one. Without these lighters of the flame, without the redemptive brightness that presupposes our blindness, we would have trouble remembering that we too possess the gift of this fire. Olitski’s song flows at the same time from an all-too-earthly place. The mythological figure Silenus plied himself with wine to become inspired. Satyrs crushed grapes into bowls to make the liquor of his poetry. Asleep or semiconscious, intoxicated, he found his divine voice. Carried away by his own lyric, he was carried away by others, not knowing what he said. He knew only that he had found “what makes the heart pound and sound throughout the work,” to quote Olitski about his own aims.2 Olitski’s paintings are about this state of being swept away, evoking the divine transport of the person who made them. However, the prohibition against this earthy emotion was strong when he made them. Greenberg himself refused the language of feelings: “Lay off that flowery stuff,” he would have told Olitski had he made his “pound and sound” speech.3 Where was the massive calm in an art of inspired eloquence? He needed to make an art that avoided all “heart-on-the-sleeve” effects4—in the words of his Bennington colleague Paul Feeley, who strove for a disinterested art of passion. Yet the works in this show are the crushed color of an ecstatic song. The artist must be outside himself, in a rapturous state, if he is to create a new world of heaven and earth. As Olitski affirmed, the aim of art is pleasure. The history of art informed this dream. Olitski’s first great love was Rembrandt [1606–1669], the painter whose works made a deep

Fig.1 Peter Paul Rubens. Dream of Silenus, ca. 1610–12. Oil on canvas, 62 ¼ x 85 3⁄8 in. (158 x 217 cm). Collection of the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, Austria. Fig.2 Michelangelo Buonarroti. The Creation of the Sun and Moon, 1511. Fresco, 110 x 220 in. (280 x 570 cm). The Sistine Chapel, Vatican City.

impression on him when he saw them as a teenager at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The spackle paintings Olitski made in the late 1950s feature thick and slathered surfaces, an homage to the Dutch painter’s impasto. The surfaces manifest a faith that only heavily worked paint could suggest lived experience. In the paintings in this show, however, dating from 1959 to 1965, the impasto is gone, replaced by the saturated brightness of acrylic soaked into raw canvas.That brightness has no exact equivalent in prior art, but its outsized, ribald, Silenus-like grandiosity suggests the work of Peter Paul Rubens [1577–1640], Rembrandt’s own model. In Rubens’s Dream of Silenus (fig.1), one of the painter’s several homages to the mythological figure, the protean poet sits collapsed at lower left, a sagging version of Michelangelo’s Adam in the Creation of Man (ca.1508–12) in the Sistine Chapel. Fingering the horse fur of his legs, his head and body slumped, he appears to dream of his cave-like surroundings. The two satyrs above him sipping the wine and squeezing the grapes seem figments of that dream. The lovers at upper right likewise seem an unconscious episode. The great array of vessels stocking the stone floor suggests not only the intoxication of the dreamer but the extravagant nature of the dream their liquors have inspired. A bounty of shiny chalices illumines the dark mind, spinning like retinal fireworks upon closed eyelids. The true power of protean creativity—Rubens’s own—assumes an uncanny quality, with the glowing cups and bowls taking on a reality independent of their creator. This independence is a secret of Olitski’s art. For this Silenus-Rubens of the early 1960s, the bright circle-like shape, agog in funky shimmers of Day-Glo color, erases the trace between itself and the dreamer. Olitski spun off effects like God in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco The Creation of the Sun and Moon (fig.2). In that picture, itself a model for the young Rubens when he saw it in Rome in the early seventeenth century, the sun rolls off God’s fingers, a twirling disk of fire, burnished into independent life. Olitski, painting in an era after chapels, when art had become a substitute religion, treats his godhood more crazily, throwing his spheres less like a deity casting orbs than like a bowler aiming for strikes. But the effect of making glowing worlds separate from oneself is the same in each case, whether at the Bowl-O-Rama or the Vatican. The artist was a Passion Machine, to cite the title of one of the paintings in this show. He churned out new heavens to replace the old faith.

The world he sought to replace was not necessarily a world, a unified cosmos. The America of the early 1960s was diverse, conflicted, impossible to name. Olitski’s art, plunging in, never claimed to make up for that torn and conflicted time. Rather, it accepted that art’s place is to offer restitution for a world that is always clamorous, unruly, unjust. Pictures such as Green Jazz (1962) and Hot Silence (fig.3) propose alternatives to our inevitable doubts and disappointments. If for once the world could be clear, if it could hang in the air, held in the balance with the respite of a momentary calm, then we might accept that at least a possibility of perfection exists in all of us. And it would be part of that perfection to see how imperfect we are, orbiting the vast circle of ourselves. All of which Olitski acknowledges—the absurdity of this faith in an art apart. The dream itself is crazy. It can only look bright, outlandish, bombastic, no longer a sure thing of suns spun from God but instead a glowing orb thrown by a carnival joker. It is a kind of slapstick. In Fatal Plunge Lady of 1963 (Pl. p.67), a dot of pink floats at lower right, satellite to a burnt orange disk that the canvas cannot hold. One giant and the other tiny, planet and moon make a comedic duo separated by a third player—the turquoise tab interceding between them. Like a joke in slow motion, the three forms rotate in a burlesque of the title’s tabloid drama. Akin to Shakespearean actors, Falstaff, Pipsqueak, and Squire Turquoise are so drugged with the fullness of their roles that they are unconscious of their own grace.The big laughing ball cannot know the delicacy of its own edge, the patient way it makes a border with blankness. Boundless mirth is scared of silence. A sense of desperation drives this lust for life. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Ivan tells his younger brother Alyosha: If I did not believe in life, if I were to lose faith in the woman I love, if I were to lose faith in the order of things, even if I were to become convinced, on the contrary, that everything is a disorderly, damned, and perhaps devilish chaos, if I were struck even by all the horrors of human disillusionment—still I would want to live, and as long as I have bent to this cup, I will not tear myself from it until I’ve drunk it all!”5

Fig.3 Jules Olitski. Hot Silence, 1962. Acrylic on canvas, 12 x 12 ½ in. (30.5 x 31.8 cm). Private Collection.

The words evoke the philosophy of Olitski, born Jevel Demikovsky in 1922 in Snovsk, Soviet Russia. He was in his late thirties and early forties when he made the paintings in this show, but Olitski might have agreed with Ivan when he tells Alyosha, “Until my thirtieth year, I know this for certain, my youth will overcome everything—all disillusionment, all aversion to live.” Aiming to triumph over more than disillusion, Olitski might have liked it when Ivan goes on, pondering the cruelty and sadness of life: “I’ve asked myself many times: is there such despair in the world as could overcome this wild and perhaps indecent thirst for life in me, and have decided that apparently there is not. . . .” Nay-sayers condemn this thirst as base, but “there is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic.”6 Olitski’s planets portray this life: base, precious, irresponsible—the bane of moralists. And maybe in so doing they return us to our own with a refreshed awareness. “Though I do not believe in the order of things,” says Ivan, “still the sticky little leaves that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit.” In the very graveyard that he knows is only a graveyard and nothing more, Ivan still loves the “sticky spring leaves, the blue sky . . . such things you love not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts, you love your first young strength. . . .”7 Olitski’s art invites us to experience this centripetal force.

1. Clement Greenberg, “Master Léger” (1954), in Greenberg, Art and Culture: Critical Essays (New York, NY: Beacon Press, 1961), 103. 2. Jules Olitski, “Clement Greenberg in My Studio,” American Art, Summer–Autumn 1994, 128. 3. Ibid. 4. David Bourdon (unsigned), “The voluble dandy who taught vision using jacks,” Life, May, 17, 1968, 98 5. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990), 230. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid.

Lucyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Fancy

1960

Acrylic on canvas

79 x 125 in. (200.7 x 317.5 cm)

“ A C U R I O U S PA I N T I N G I S TA K I N G S H A P E ” : J U L E S O L I T S K I ’ S L U D I C S U R FAC E S , 1 9 5 9 – 1 9 6 4 B Y PAT R I C I A L L E W Y

Jules Olitski’s paintings from the first half of the 1960s are at once fierce and smart. Tensile, buoyant, and jocose, they have recently been described as “gorgeous, sexy things that tested the rules of decorum” in their own time.1 As a short list of titles makes clear—Basium Blush (aftereffects of an aggressive kiss), Osculum Silence (referencing bodily openings), Wet Heat Company, Fatal Plunge Lady, Yaksi Juice, Ishtar Bra Box (for the Mesopotamian goddess of sexuality), Queen of Sheba Breast—there was heat in the making of these works, physical and sexual. Kenworth Moffett, who, with Olitski’s participation, wrote a definitive monograph on the artist in 1981, noted that the paintings’ “funky” shapes were taken from “photographs of female nudes and breasts that Olitski had used as ‘models’ as early as the impasto pictures from 1957 to 1959.”2 In the early 1970s, Olitksi would come to acquire an original artist’s cast of a standing female nude by Gaston Lachaise made in 1930, a work he thought “extravagant and luscious”; it seemed to turn its back on the viewer while at the same time holding the gaze.3 His own works from the early 1960s share these characteristics—contained yet voluptuous, and wildly compelling. For Lucy Lippard, their Day-Glo pinks, reds, and oranges—a kind of Pop palette skewed toward the feminine, recalling Tom Wesselmann’s "Great American Nude" series (begun in1961)—evoked “a perfume ad cliché.”4 Perhaps. But like Olitski’s temperament, these works are also deadly serious. Their syncopated colored elements can be understood as an inscription of double vision, as coded signs that signal illusionistic space. Here Olitski engages with the dynamic of modernist painting put forward by Michael Fried in his concept of “acknowledgement.”5 An example of this would be Frank Stella’s "Black Paintings" (1958–60), works whose stripes parallel or repeat and thus “acknowledge” the shape of the support, invoking one of the principal material conditions of painting.6 Another condition or literal element of the medium is the flat surface, but rather than parallel flatness, Olitski torques his images in a way that upends the notionally flat field, a formal tease that points to his preoccupation with spatial concerns. In this twist on concurring with flatness, Olitski’s idiosyncratic gestures play with our visual perception. His painted elements acknowledge flatness by, in a sense, working against it.7

Olitski’s engagement with modernist dialogues on abstraction begins with his arrival in Paris in 1949. He went there seeking works by Jean Dubuffet and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière whose program struck him as obsolete. In response, he rapidly tried to de-skill; having worked with portraiture in both painting and sculpture throughout the 1940s, in Paris he tried painting blindfolded, an experiment that led to his first abstract picture. But he soon returned to the figure in works that suggest the naive (art brut) figures of Dubuffet and the horrific painted faces of Constant (Constant Anton Nieuwenhuys) and Asger Jorn. He was next inspired by the matiérisme pervasive in Paris during this period, including that of Dubuffet, thickening the surface with nontraditional materials (such as haute pâte) in a drive to provoke a full range of bodily (haptic) responses beyond merely visual (optic) ones.8 This embrace of texture and form was realized in Olitski’s own “matter” paintings of the late 1950s.Then, in 1958, he met the critic Clement Greenberg. From that point forward, nothing was the same. _________________ Olitski’s early interest in art had attracted little encouragement: “No one in the family actually tried to stop me,” he has said, “but there was never approval. . . . If anything, there was a certain amount of contempt of art.”9 Even so, from his teenage years, Olitski’s prodigious talent was routed through courses of traditional academic training. These began at age thirteen, in 1935, at the Educational Alliance on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, continued when he was seventeen at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and went on from his eighteenth through twenty-first year at Manhattan’s Beaux-Arts Institute of Design and National Academy of Design simultaneously.10 In 1939, at seventeen, Olitski encountered a twenty-five-gallery survey of Western art from the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries at the New York World’s Fair, and was overcome by the paintings of Rembrandt. “It’s true that as a youth,” he says, “Rembrandt was the first major painter to whose work I felt closely and deeply related—as if I had discovered a real father.”11 Olitski’s “real father”—his biological father, after whom he was named—was Jevel Demikovsky, a commissar in revolutionary Russia who

was executed by the Soviets before the artist was born.12 His second father was Hyman Olitsky, whom his mother married in 1926, three years after emigrating from Russia to the United States.13 This change marked the start of a violent home life punctuated by irrational bouts of physical and psychic abuse:

Fig.1 Jules Olitski. Self-Portrait with a Paint Brush, 1942. Oil on canvas, 22 ¼ x 14 ½ in. (56.5 x 36.8 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

My mother remarried when I was about four years old, [to] a widower with two sons. Then my nightmare began. Early childhood for me was like Cinderella with a male cast. I took an awful beating. By the time I was five or six my head was filled with an eerie humming sound and an image of a man that would get bigger and bigger until I felt it would bust through my skull; then very, very, very slowly it would get smaller and smaller until it became a tiny dot, almost nothing. That would be as terrifying as when it was large. It went on and on like that.14 Outside the home, however, Olitski was earning accolades—prizes, scholarships, and a coveted place at the National Academy of Design— while spending evenings at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design, a trade school that catered to first-generation immigrants, generally from working-class backgrounds (fig.1). After serving in the army from 1942 to 1945, Olitski returned to the Educational Alliance to study sculpture with Chaim Gross, and by 1949, when he went to Paris on the GI Bill, he had mastered a full range of artistic techniques. In Paris he studied briefly with Ossip Zadkine at Zadkine’s Studio of Modern Sculpture and Drawing, at 70 rue NotreDame-des-Champs: [The studio was] full of American GI’s. He patronized us—the usual stuff—we should stick to what Americans are good at: plumbing and athletics, and I thought: “screw you.” The chemistry was not good between us . . . and telling us at the same time how superior the French are to us. . . . After three months I left Zadkine’s studio and just painted where I was living.15 Olitski actually entered the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, but his enrollment was merely pro forma, carried out to satisfy the tuition requirement of the GI Bill: He claimed never to have attended classes.16 Instead, he closeted himself in studios, the first in Chaville, outside Paris, the next in the city on the rue des Suisses, in a former hotel owned by a sculptor who was no longer active.17 Olitski’s own experience of war, his disappointment with the course of studies he had undertaken, his self-imposed isolation from a vibrant, if loose, association of artists and galleries, and his sense of being untethered from family and friends led him to pose a series of probing

questions: “What does the art I make have to do with me? Is it enough to make the kind of art I make? Where was my voice? Had I a voice? How to find out?”18 He found the answers by painting blindfolded, an exercise in de-skilling that subverted and suppressed his previous years of training.19 Covering his eyes with a towel, he daubed the canvas with random colors that he had squeezed onto a wooden plank. My brush found the canvas and moved on it. Another brush, another color, another brush, another color, another, another, another. . . . What I saw were daubs of bright, flat colors that looked slap-dab rough and startingly alive. It was more like a child playing: completely playful and completely serious, both at the same time.20 Although Olitski would describe these Paris years as a time of “introspection,” an attempt to move closer to an authentic vocabulary, he was nothing if not porous to the art around him.21 Before leaving for Paris, he had read Greenberg’s back-to-back accounts of Dubuffet and the artists who fell under the rubric “School of Paris 1946,” where Greenberg had set Dubuffet’s work above the “confection[s]” of artists who conflated “Picasso’s drawings with Matisse’s color.”22 He saw Dubuffet as standing alone among those artists who had scaled up Paul Klee’s whimsy and naive drawing style into a “monumental and far more physical” presence.23 As an example, Greenberg cited Dubuffet’s Promeneuse au parapluie of 1945 (fig.2), which had been shown that same year at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery, where Olitski may well have seen it.

Once in Paris, Olitski sought out similar pictures at the Galerie René Drouin, where French artist and theorist Michel Tapié—“this lovely, gentle man. . . . I will always remember his generosity”—showed him examples of Dubuffet’s work. He brought out the Dubuffets and I was struck; they stayed with me. They were Dubuffet’s work from the ’40s. It was the thick, fluid use of materials that surely had an influence on me, and I gladly attribute it to him. Some critics have pointed to [Jean] Fautrier, but it was Dubuffet.24 No wonder, then, that Olitski used the de-skilling attained through his blind abstractions to move from his own academic portraiture into a series of cartoonish distortions of the human figure, rendered in loose, thick contours (fig.3). Fellow American artist Oscar Chelimsky, also in Paris on the GI Bill since 1948, described them this way: “Olitski had a very exciting one-man show [at the Galerie Huit]. . . . [His paintings are] recognizable but they’re almost Surrealistic, [a] very orgiastic sort of thing, very vital and brilliant.”25 The Galerie Huit was a space opened by a cooperative of American artists on the rue Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, in the former studio of sculptor Robert Rosenwald.26 Olitski was one of six elected to serve on its exhibition committee. The permeable atmosphere of artists, artist collectives, and galleries in Paris at the time encouraged the free association not only of Surrealists but also of the artists who came together in the CoBrA group (named for the cities of Copenhagen, Brussels, and Amsterdam). Many of the CoBrA artists, whose members included Jorn and Constant,

Fig.2 Jean Dubuffet. Promeneuse au parapluie (Woman Walking with Umbrella), 1945. Oil on canvas, 36 1⁄5 x 25 ½ in. (92 x 65 cm). Private Collection.

Fig.4 Jules Olitski. Drawing Board Red with Black, ca. 1952. Oil on Masonite, 36 x 39 (91.4 x 99.1 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

participated in exhibitions at the Galerie Huit. For Chelimsky, a criterion of CoBrA was that “‘something’ had to happen, ‘something else’ had to break out . . . a kind of far-out feeling about it . . . a courageous sense.”27 Olitski’s one-person exhibition at Galerie Huit in 1951 evidently met that criterion, for he was among the throng of artists invited to participate in CoBrA’s 2nd International Exhibition of Experimental Art at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Liège, Belgium, to be mounted in 1951. But his Paris sojourn was disrupted by the disintegration of his first marriage, and he returned to the United States before he could accept the invitation, and he destroyed many of the pictures that had attracted such interest. Olitski’s drawing-board series, begun soon after his return to New York, came about in the way most of his work did—from a drive to emphasize the material nature of the surface, and a desire to “make the surface count.”28 Disused drawing boards he found lying about the Art Students League showed a consistent image: an empty central rectangle, where drawing paper had once been, surrounded by paint splatters at the margins. These drawing boards suggested to him a compositional form and style. Inverting his approach to the earlier blind paintings, in which he refused visualization, and using the drawing boards as models, Olitski now employed strokes of thickened paint to create a merely notional central image, largely monochrome, devoid of subject matter (fig.4).

Fig.3 Jules Olitski. Demikov, ca. 1950. Oil on paper mounted on board, 41 x 27 ½ in. (104.1 x 69.9 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

Fig.5 Jules Olitski. Nude Seen from the Back, 1957. Spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigments on canvas, 29 ½ x 12 in. (74.9 x 30.4 cm). Private Collection. Fig.6 Henri Matisse. Nu de Dos IV (The Back IV), ca. 1950. Bronze, 74 x 44 ¼ x 6 in. (188 x 112.4 x 15.2 cm). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

In the mid-1950s, Olitski transitioned from his drawing-board paintings to his so-called “matter” works, a series of small, richly impastoed abstract black-and-white paintings that built on his continuing interest in matiérisme. Continuing the oscillation between figuration and abstraction that he had started in Paris, the “matter” paintings, begun about 1957, shifted from the abstraction of the drawing-board works to an abstracted figuration. Their surfaces are bulked up with spackle and acrylic resin, returning the central image, now heavily material, to prominence (figs.5 and 7). The schematized, sculpted shapes that resulted call to mind both Henri Matisse’s basrelief “Back” series from between 1909 and 1931 (fig.6) and Cycladic figurines from the third millennium BCE (fig.8). It was also in this period that Olitski’s characteristically suggestive titles began to appear—Lucy Lubric (fig.9), for example, with its allusion to the slippery vulva. (The work features traces of sensuous, pliable modeling, garnished with swipes of prismatic color against a two-toned ground of red and black.) In other works, chromatic splashes of green, orange, red, pink, mauve, and yellow highlight the physicality of the raised forms. Texture conveys mass, the shapes expressing their materials directly and sumptuously. The accumulations of spackle and acrylic resin from which these forms arise are made perspicuous in the manner described by Adrian Stokes in The Stones of Rimini: “Carving shape, however abstract, is seen as belonging essentially to a particular substance. . . . A figure carved in stone is fine carving when one feels that not the figure, but the stone through the medium of the figure, has come to life.”29 Olitski’s “matter” paintings are both physically substantial and composed images. Pictorial dimension is achieved through a tactile surface, a kind of spatial play brought about by material abundance. Multiple planes arise from the flat surface, and soft transitions between pictorial and textural elements reinforce the sense of dimensional space. In 1958, Olitski exhibited twenty-six of these “matter” paintings at the Alexander Iolas Gallery in his first one-person exhibition in New York. The story of that exhibition is one of risk, deceit, intrigue, confession, reparation, and ultimate reward.30 It is pure Olitski, astonishingly inventive, at once a goad and a high-wire act of daring proportions. The show also led to Olitski’s meeting Greenberg, and marked the beginning of his relationship with what the critic would christen “Post-Painterly Abstraction.” As Greenberg made his way toward a Roberto Matta exhibition in the Iolas Gallery’s main 22

Fig.7 Jules Olitski. Ballet Dancer – Waiting, 1959. Spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigments on canvas, 50 x 41 in. (127 x 104.1 cm). Private Collection. Fig.8 Figurine of a Woman from Syros (Cyclades), Greece, ca. 2600–2300 BCE. Collection of the National Archeological Museum, Athens, Greece.

Fig.9 Jules Olitski. Lucy Lubric, 1959. Spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigment on canvas, 72 x 84 in. (182.9 x 213.6 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

second-floor space, he inadvertently glanced into a ground-floor space called the Zodiac Room, run by Iolas and dedicated to emerging artists.31 He liked what he saw, mentioned Olitski casually to friends, and, when he received a note from Olitski thanking him for visiting the show, invited the young artist to come by for a drink. Eight months later, Greenberg included Olitski in a group show at French and Company, New York (where the critic had become a paid consultant to the gallery’s short-lived contemporary-art program), along with Barnett Newman, Friedel Dzubas, Adolph Gottlieb, Wolfgang Hollegha, Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland, and David Smith. A year later, in 1959, Greenberg organized a one-person exhibition for Olitski at French and Company. Noland helped him hang it. “The guy who worked there for that purpose was not around. Ken walked in, took charge, and hung the show and it was great. I am forever grateful to him for that.”32 Noland and Louis, who had been staining canvases with Magna acrylic since the mid-1950s, proved formative influences for Olitski, and the 1959 exhibition marked the last of his “matter” pictures. Even before the show, he was experimenting with dyeing canvas to achieve the staining effect he saw in their work. The larger point, however, is that the stain works Olitski saw around him stimulated conversations that led to further experimentation—and Greenberg figured prominently among his interlocutors. Years later, in the early 1970s, when the American novelist Bernard Malamud asked Greenberg during a lecture at Bennington College what made his work as a critic “special,” Greenberg answered that he tried to “get at the mechanism. I bear down.” Driving back to New Hampshire after the lecture, with Greenberg prone in the back seat, Olitski asked, “Is that what you do, get at the mechanism? Is that it?” The terse reply came at him: “Yeah, the mechanism. And don’t ask me to explain. Anyway, you know damn well what I mean by the mechanism. And keep your eyes on the road!”33 Olitski wrote: I did know. At least, I think I did. The mechanism is what makes the work work. It’s what makes the heart pound and sound throughout the work. Had I said anything remotely like this, however, he probably would have shut me up with a “Lay off that flowery stuff.” Who knows, though. He might have said, as he only occasionally did, “That’s good. I’m going to use that the next time I talk. I’ll credit you.”34

What’s to stop guys from just stepping up and whacking a ball and making a painting?

—Frank Stella35

In a letter to Greenberg dated March 22, 1962, Olitski sent the influential critic four sketches, rendered in blue ballpoint pen on a single lined yellow page. He noted, “A curious painting is taking shape.”36 Each sketch depicts a loosely drawn vertical rectangular frame within which are clustered small circular marks in various configurations of fours, fives, and eights, off axis within an extended empty field. In one sketch, two groups of over twenty pinhole-like outlines, arrayed as two stacked groups of ten ovals, swell into a torso-like form (fig.10). These sketches reflect the emergence of the oval as a motif in Olitski’s work. Their small-penned ovals would become daubs of color set in relief against halos of bare canvas, themselves splayed over a monochromatic field. In that form they suggest nothing so much as clustered points of light, a sudden piercing of a surface that is otherwise sealed off, nearly impenetrable. Why these points came to Olitski in that moment is unknowable. What we do know, however, is that he had whacked that ball. The force with which he sent it flying was single-minded, and its impact indelible. Having met Greenberg in 1958, Olitski was by 1962 an intimate of the critic’s and a fierce, erudite, disputative yet passionately loyal Fig.10 Jules Olitski. Four ballpoint pen sketches from a letter to Clement Greenberg, March 22, 1962. Inscribed, “As Always, regards to Jenny [Janice Van Horne, Greenberg’s wife].” Courtesy of the Jules Olitski Estate Archives.

_________________

correspondent.37 To be clear, Olitski was not seeking advice in his letter of March 22, he was declaring an idea in the process of formation, one that would ultimately be realized in major large-scale paintings. In Beautiful Bald Woman (1963, Pl. p.70), for example, small bursts of orange, green, and blue peer out at lower left, each giving off a white halation to radiate from within a dense field of modulated dark-purple stain, with the overall effect, in Fried’s description, of “color falling as momentum accumulates.”38 Vasily Kandinsky’s Several Circles (fig.11), with its interstellar globes, might be seen as a precedent for these works featuring small backlit color bursts, for Olitski surely knew the Kandinsky painting, which New York’s Museum of Non-Objective Painting (now the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) had acquired in 1941. But Kandinsky’s forms are unrelentingly geometric, and read as three-dimensional orbs rather than flattened disks. Olitski’s shapes are irregular ovals that lack the hard edge and volumetric shading of Kandinsky’s forms. In both works, however, the shapes seem backlit so as to imply a light source behind them, creating a degree of illusionistic depth. In Olitski’s case, that impulse toward three-dimensionality evolved out of his preoccupation with spatial effects, evident in his drawing-board and “matter” paintings. It reappears in what Olitski called his “creative thesis,” proposed while he was “a doctoral candidate at [New York University] around the year 1955 or 1956.”39 That essay, Tim Hilton writes, was meant to “extend Rembrandt’s use of flowing paint . . . into modern painting.”40 Olitski called this idea his “Rembrandt notion”41 and elaborated it in a typescript from 1965: With Rembrandt there was . . . a specific quality I was drawn to; his way of possessing the surface; there are no holes in a good Rembrandt. Inner depth and lateral expansion are as if sewn together. . . . For myself, Rembrandt pointed in the direction where true flatness is realized—and that remains the great challenge.42 It’s worth parsing this statement, written at the moment Olitski turned to the compressor and spray gun that for him would redefine surface planarity. His choice of the verb “possess” is telling, for it is as if possession has become the principal driver of Olitski’s artistic intention. The artist’s paintings up to and through these years strive for an intact surface, one that is “sewn together,” and in which “inner depth and lateral expansion” are established as copresences. “True flatness” for Olitski is not the same as a reduction to literal planarity; it is, rather, a quest (“the great challenge”) to render a surface that could account for the “holes” (depth cues) as well as the expanses of laterality. It is a pictorial flatness that is porous, admitting markers of spatial ambiguity. Greenberg had famously proposed that the trend in painting during the later 1950s and early ’60s was toward making explicit the material mechanisms of the medium, what he called their “artisanal” aspect—the foregrounding of the flat support, the acknowledgment of the bounding edges, and the freeing of color from its historical role as local accent to

Fig.11 Vasily Kandinsky. Several Circles, 1926. Oil on canvas, 55 3⁄8 x 55 ¼ in. (140.7 x 140.3 cm). Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

allow it to function as autonomous subject and actor—all in the service of modernism’s heightening of aesthetic value “as such, as an ultimate.”43 Earlier, Greenberg had written that the evolution of modernist painting brought with it a growing resistance among artists to, as he wrote, “hole through” the flat picture plane in order to render “realistic perspectival space.”44 But in works by Hans Hofmann, Mark Rothko, and Clyfford Still, Greenberg recognized a new kind of flatness, one that “breathe[d] and pulsate[d],” urging the viewer toward a sense that spatial elements were in play.45 In painting after painting, Olitski proposed a tension between the ostensibly frontal and the provocatively oblique image, the latter suggesting a slight rotation in relation to the support. In many works his dense, quasi-painterly handling—not impasto per se, but not without texture either, whether brushed, squeegeed, or rubbed—renders the surface nearly opaque. In this way he achieves a brute literalness that induces a sense of corporeality and links unstable shapes and analogous colors into a seamless unity. Yet the suggestions of rotation, coupled with areas of light that penetrate the opacity, are unmistakable signs of split spatial registers. In a work such as East Seventieth Street Rapture (1962, Pl. p.57), this interpenetration of opaqueness and light undermines a merely flat, frontal reading. Mascha (1961, Pl. p.40) juxtaposes two irregular ovals, one tipping precariously right and upward. The larger, lower one spreads diagonally, pulled toward opposing corners as if by force fields. Its black perimeter and purplish blue interior hue are separated by a wobbly rectangular ring of red that, through shared texture and saturation, supports the effect of a surface continuous

Fig.12 Henri Matisse. L’Atelier rouge ( The Red Studio), 1911. Oil on canvas, 71 ¼ x 86 ¼ in. (181 x 219.1 cm). Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

with the surrounding reddish field. The latter accordingly makes itself felt as surround rather than background, creating a sense of unity and coherence. And the teetering ovals do something else: they imply an off-axis tilt that seems to torque them away from the flat support. Compressed and suspended as they are within dense coloration, these warped ovals emerge as oblique to the picture plane. Olitski calls our attention to twinned significations of space and flatness experienced simultaneously. This impression can be related to Matisse’s L'Atelier rouge (fig.12), that great decorative painting of the second decade of the twentieth century. It might well have modeled for Olitski a similar expanse of continuous color density in which images are mired, yet turned. Through artifice of tint and tone, Olitski has structured our gaze so that what one might call traditional foreground and background are intimated but underrealized, teased instead into perceptual recognition. Such depth cues or spatial markers subvert flatness, prodding the viewer, challenging vision, confounding sight. Spatial markers are also at play in works such as In My Old Tin Lizzie (1961, Pl. p.31), where stacked ovals totter, slanting away from their frontal perch—a play of signs that both acknowledges and resists suggestions of spatial depth. Looking at a work such as Basium Blush (1960, Pl. p.29), one apprehends almost immediately a surface comprised of elongated, evenly applied brushstrokes overlaid and interwoven. Colors are laid down not as contours delimiting shape, but as areas—or, as Fried called them, “zones”—of hue within a uniform surface density.46 Works such as Basium Blush and Fair Charlotte (1961, Pl. p.39) seem to contain oases of color differentiation within a continuous field, where value is consistent across the surface, even among various hues, reinforcing a totalizing effect. Olitski often resorted to off-kilter bilaterality, as in Lucy’s Fancy (1960, Pl. p.17), where conjoined ovals ringed in concentric color lean and tilt, thwarting stasis. The canvas between color zones is left bare in Yellow Juice (1961, Pl. p.35) and Free Spirit (1963, Pl. p.60), opening up space while weighting color and forcing it toward the perimeters. This color weight is achieved by contrasting the near opacity of the dense, soaked-in hue with illuminated openness. The four empty corners in Free Spirit feel provisional, as if about to be submerged in dark green—pressured, as it were, by speeding centrifugal forces. Olitski’s colors make themselves felt as active entities that catalyze motion, seeming to determine their own expanses. In seeking to “possess” his surfaces, Olitski staged an escape from

flatness by asserting color as a structuring element. Several works feature the unimpeded progression of a single hue that shifts in value as it proceeds from one upper corner diagonally toward the lower. Color does not lock up across the surface but moves, flowing and breathing, prizing open the picture plane to intimations of spatial depth. In another context, Greenberg called such subtle shifts in hue and density “legato passage[s] . . . of value gradation.”47 As a color area assumes a breast-like shape in Fatal Plunge Lady (1963, Pl. p.67), its sensuous diagonal flow becomes, as Fried wrote, “a broad vertical curtain of color” that tracks subtle shifts in weight and density.48 The devolution of color areas from large to small, from breast— explicitly named in Queen of Sheba Breast (Pl. p.74) from the same year—to nipple, narrows the zones of hue without decreasing their intensity. The liminal arena in which Olitski operated is a giddy place. Look at Potsy (1960, Pl. p.11), or Fanny Dimes (1960, Pl. p.10). These are awkward, ludic images, whose eccentricity lies in the play of diverging planes and the flirtations with tilt and rotation. They call to mind Olitski’s own sense of liminality when, walking around the grounds surrounding the Palais des Papes in Avignon, he described his experience of traversing uneven ground as “one thing becom[ing] part of the other, of not knowing where you are in relation to anything else, of ‘los[ing] the sense of where you are.’ ”49 The equivocation of surface in these paintings—a provocation conveyed by slipping planes, “funky” forms, and garish coloration—was at once a sly wink at contemporary mass-cultural formations such as Pop art and an ironic disparagement of modernist taste. A curious painting was indeed taking shape in 1962. It had a look of daring, a receptive openness to radical coloration, and the shape of seductive sexiness. Like the works that marked Olitski’s first break from convention, these, too, are “completely playful and completely serious, both at the same time.” And like his earlier experiments, these paintings come out of play, serious play. Their ludic quality—their spontaneous, exploratory playfulness—gives them an irresistible allure. As Olitski would say, they “look alive.”50

1. Sarah K. Rich, “Previews,” Artforum, May 2011, 141. See also Rich, “Jules Olitski: Trouble in Paradise,” in David Moos, ed., The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950–2005, exh. cat. (Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2005), 24–31; and Rich, “What’s Your Pleasure, Mr. Olitski?” paper presented at “Rethinking Color Field: Aspects of Painting and Criticism in the 1960s,” workshop sponsored by History of Art and the Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, March 2, 2017. 2. Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olitski (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 38. 3. Lachaise’s Venus of Willendorf-like drawings and sculptures were by this time well known. In a videotaped interview with Moffett, Olitski referred to the cast of a Lachaise sculpture, Standing Nude (1930), purchased in the 1970s, to illustrate a distinction between the “impassive” work of art and the work of art that “besieges” the viewer. “The Lachaise—it doesn’t ask you for anything; it doesn’t besiege; it’s there in itself; even this—as extravagant and luscious as it is—even she seems to turn her back on you. . . . You have to come to the work of art.” In Moffett, “Interview of Jules Olitski, 1977,” Jules Olitski Papers, 1959–2012, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, digital ID 18176. 4. Lucy Lippard, “New York Letter,” Art International, January 1966, 91. Quoted here from Rich, “Previews,” 141. 5. See Danielle Follett, “The Stakes of Modernist Acknowledgment,” nonsite.org, November 1, 2017. Available online at https://nonsite.org/feature/the-stakes-of-modernist-acknowledgment (accessed February 22, 2020). Follett carefully and persuasively argues for Michael Fried’s concept, calling it “one of his most important insights into the dynamics of the artwork.” 6. This point is made in Follet, “Modernist Acknowledgment.” See also Michael Fried, “Shape as Form: Frank Stella’s Irregular Polygons,” 1966, 83, 88; and “Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella,” 1965, 233; both in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998). 7. I am indebted to several art historians whose writings have informed my thinking: Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” “Shape as Form,” “Three American Painters,” “Art and Objecthood,” 1967, and “Jules Olitski,” 1966–67, all in Art and Objecthood, 1–76, 77–99, 132– 147, 213–268, respectively; Rosalind E. Krauss, “Jules Olitski,” in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, exh. cat. (Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1968), n.p.; Krauss, “On Frontality,” Artforum, May 1968, 40–46; Krauss, “In the Name of Picasso,” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986), 23–41; and Michael Shreyach, “Re-created Flatness: Hans Hofmann’s Concept of the Picture Plane as a Medium of Expression,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 49, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 44–67. 8. See Rachel E. Perry, “Histoire de l’Aveugle. ‘Matiérisme’s’ Critique of Vision,” in Analecta Husserliana: The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research 58, The Orchestration of the Arts: A Creative Symbiosis of Existential Powers, ed. Marlies Kronegger (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic, 2000), 224. Asger Jorn, writing in Cobra no. 1, 1949, defends matiérisme against Marxist notions of materialism as represented by Social Realist art, arguing that “true realism, materialist realism, renouncing the idealist equation of subjectivity with individualism as described by Marx, seeks the forms of reality that are ‘common to the senses of all men’ . . . A materialist art must put art back on a foundation of the senses . . . for we believe that the origins of art are instinctive and thus materialist.” Quoted here from Sarah Wilson, ed. and trans., Aftermath, France 1945–1954, New Images of Man, exh. cat. (London, UK: Barbican Art Gallery, 1982), 107. Michel Tapié’s first one-person exhibition in New York was mounted at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1953, after Olitski had returned to the city from Paris. 9. Olitski, in an unpublished interview with Donna Poydinecz-Conley, 1978, excerpted here with the kind permission of Lauren Olitski Poster, Director, Estate of Jules Olitski.

10.The Educational Alliance, opened in 1889 by a group of German-Jewish philanthropists as a settlement house for East European Jews, established its site a few years later at 197 East Broadway. See “A History of Educational Alliance,” available online at https://edalliance.org/ about-us/history/timeline/ (accessed February 22, 2020). Although the Educational Alliance is not named in the most recent full chronology of Olitski’s life, put together by Moffett with assistance from Olitski and others in his circle, it is clearly identifiable from the list of teachers and the institution’s stated mission to educate Eastern European immigrants. Olitski would return to the Educational Alliance to study figurative sculpture with Chaim Gross in 1947. See Elinor L. Woron and Moffett, “Chronology,” in Moffett, Jules Olitski, 202. 11. Jules Olitski, unpublished typescript, dated 1965 (emphasis in the original), Jules Olitski Estate, courtesy Poster. Olitski would have seen fifteen works by Rembrandt in Gallery XIX, which was dedicated to the master. For the specific paintings on view, see “Complete Catalogue of the Painting and Sculpture (By Galleries),” in Masterpieces of Art: Exhibition at the New York World’s Fair, 1939, exh. cat. (New York, NY: Art News, 1939), n.p. This illustrated publication was the fair’s official souvenir guide and included a foreword by William R. Valentiner and an introduction to the exhibition by Alfred M. Frankfurter. 12. Jevel Demikovsky had been a state-appointed commissar in Gomel, in what is today Belarus, during the Russian Civil War. He was put to death in Snovsk, in today’s Ukraine, during a period of famine and civil violence that led to massive purges within the Communist Party. Olitski was born in Snovsk in March 1922, only a few months after his father’s death. He titled a work from 1962, now in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, Born in Snovsk. 13. As late as 1942, Olitski was using the name Yewel Demichowsky, his birth name (also spelled Jewel Demichowska and Jevel Demikovsky) and the name under which he entered the US Army that year. See South Carolina, Naturalization Records, 1868–1991, s.v. “Fewel Demichowsky,” Ancestry.com, and Hamburg Passenger Lists, 1850–1934, s.v. “Fewel Demichowski,” Ancestry.com. He took the name Jules Olitsky when he became a naturalized US citizen in 1944. “Olitsky” was the name’s original spelling; the artist’s name became “Olitski” through a printing error made by the Alexander Iolas Gallery on the occasion of his first one-person exhibition in New York in 1958. He decided to retain the new spelling. 14. Olitski, in Henry Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” April 11–12, 1990, in Geldzahler, Tim Hilton, and Dominique Fourcade, Jules Olitski, exh. cat. (New York, NY: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, 1990), 7. 15. Olitski, in Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” 15. My thanks to Tjerk Wiegersma of Wiegersma Fine Art, Brussels, who supplied Ossip Zadkine’s studio information in an e-mail, January 29, 2020. 16. As artist Oscar Chelimsky put it, “In order to collect on the GI Bill you had to be registered in a school.” Chelimsky, in Michael Plante, “Oral history interview with Oscar Chelimsky, 1990 August 28–September 5,” typescript, n.p., Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. See also US National Archives & Records Administration, Servicemen’s Readjustment Act (1944), available online at www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=false&doc=76 (accessed February 25, 2020). Olitski explained that the school was filled with hundreds of ex-GIs and that he was tipped off that someone could sign you in: “That was what was so nice about it: you didn’t have to go.” In Moffett, “Interview of Jules Olitski, 1977.” 17. Chelimsky told an interviewer he had discovered it on one of his walks. “It was in the area where artists like [Alberto] Giacometti and Zao Wou-Ki and [Maria Helena] Vieira da Silva had studios . . . a little broken-down hotel . . . and finally Paul Jenkins had a studio there, so did Sidney Geist, and [Janice] Biala, and Olitski. I have a sort of a talent for finding studios, you know?” Chelimsky describes a very vibrant art world: “The Paris art world was like one great big family. . . . People were interested in finding out what was happening, which way to go. . . . It was [a] time when people contacted each other and talked. . . . Then, it was a quality of people who wanted to find their way and worth and felt somewhat lost and wanted to meet other human beings and just talk with them. ‘What do you think? Is this right? Is this wrong?’ So, it had a beautiful atmosphere.” Chelimsky, in Plante, “Oral history interview with Oscar Chelimsky,” n.p.

18. Olitski, “Jules Olitski,” in Phillip L. Berman, ed., The Courage of Conviction (New York, NY: Ballantine, 1985), 188.

32. Olitski, in Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” 19. In ibid., Olitski recalls that it was Tony Smith who designed the new contemporary-art space for French & Company.

19. Willem de Kooning undertook a series of blind drawings in the 1960s. See Richard Shiff, “‘With Closed Eyes’: De Kooning’s Twist,” Master Drawings 40, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 73–88. De Kooning writes, “I am the source of a rumor concerning these drawings, and it is true that I made them with closed eyes. Also, the pad I used was always held horizontally. The drawings often started by the feet . . . but more often by the center of the body, in the middle of the page. There is nothing special about this . . . but I found that closing the eyes was very helpful to me.” Ibid., 73 n. 2. Allan Kaprow famously described Jackson Pollock’s automatist approach to painting as a kind of “ecstatic blindness.” Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock,” 1958, in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life, ed. Jeff Kelley (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 1.

33. Olitski, “Clement Greenberg in My Studio,” 128. Clement Greenberg presented nine lectures on nine separate evenings at Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont, in 1971 (April 6–22). A transcription of all nine lectures was published as Part II of Greenberg, Homemade Aesthetics: Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79–195. For audio recordings of eight of the nine lectures, see Bennington College, “Visual Arts Lectures, https://crossettlibrary.dspacedirect.org/handle/11209/9716?show=full. Bernard Malamud joined the Division of Language and Literature at Bennington College in 1961, maintaining the affiliation until his death in 1986.

20. Olitski, “Jules Olitski,” 188–189.

35. Frank Stella, quoted in Saul Ostrow, “Frank Stella,” Bomb, Spring 2000, 35.

21. Woron and Moffett, “Chronology,” 204.

36. Olitski, letter to Greenberg, March 22, 1962. Clement Greenberg Papers, box 6, folder 14, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

22. Clement Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters,” 1946, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 2, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–1949 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 90. Greenberg also wrote about Dubuffet in “Jean Dubuffet and French Existentialism,” 1946, “Review of Exhibitions of Jean Dubuffet and Jackson Pollock,” 1947, and “Jean Dubuffet and ‘Art Brut,’ ” 1949, all in Arrogant Purpose, respectively 91–92, 122–123, and 289–291. Olitski could have read all of these essays before leaving for Paris.

34. Ibid.

37. See ibid. The letters range in year from 1962 to 1983. 38. Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International, May 1964, 40. 39. Hilton, “Jules Olitski,” in Geldzahler, Hilton, and Fourcade, Jules Olitski, 56. Olitski had obtained his master’s degree in art education from New York University in 1955.

23. “Dubuffet is the only French painter who, to my knowledge, has consulted [Paul] Klee, but he has made of Klee’s influence something monumental and far more physical.” Greenberg, “Review of an Exhibition of School of Paris Painters,” 90.

40. Hilton, “Jules Olitski,” in Geldzahler, Hilton, and Fourcade, Jules Olitski, 56.

24. Olitski, in Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” 15. Dubuffet had exhibited at the Galerie René Drouin since 1944, and in 1947 its basement had become his Foyer d’Art Brut, where paintings, assemblages, and artifacts by children, autodidacts, and the mentally unstable—those who had bypassed conventional art training in one way or another—were housed.

42. Olitski, unpublished essay (ellipses original), 1965. Jules Olitski Estate, courtesy Poster.

25. Chelimsky, in Plante, “Oral history interview with Oscar Chelimsky,” n.p. 26. The founding artists of the Galerie Huit were Chelimsky, Geist, Rod Abrahamson, Paul Keene, Robert Kulicke, Reginald Pollack, and Haywood “Bill” Rivers. See Sidney Geist and Geoffry Jacques, Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris 1950–52, exh. cat. (New York, NY: Studio 18 Gallery, 2002)

41. Olitski, letter to Moffett, June 20, 1980, quoted in Moffett, Jules Olitski, 20 n. 5.

43. Greenberg, “Necessity of ‘Formalism,’ ” 1971, in Late Writings, ed. Robert C. Morgan (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 46. 44. Greenberg, “Towards a New Laocoön,” 1940, in The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. O’Brian, vol. 1, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–1944 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 34.

27. Chelimsky, in Plante, “Oral history interview with Oscar Chelimsky,” n.p.

45. Greenberg, Art and Culture (1961; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1965), 266. For a discussion of Hans Hofmann’s understanding of pictorial space, see Michael Schreyach, “Barnett Newman’s ‘Sense of Space’: A Noncontextualist Account of Its Perception and Meaning,” in “Fuzzy Studies: A Symposium on the Consequence of Blur, Part 5,” Common Knowledge 19, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 351–379.

28. Olitski, quoted in Moffett, Jules Olitski, 17 n. 5.

46. Fried, “New York Letter,” 40.

29. Adrian Stokes, Stones of Rimini (London, UK: Faber & Faber, 1934), quoted here from Krauss, “Tanktotem: Welded Images,” in Passages in Modern Sculpture (reprint ed. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 191–192.

47. Greenberg, “Collage,” in Art and Culture, 71.

30. See Olitski, “My First New York Show,” Partisan Review 56, no. 1 (1989): 34–44; and Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” 16–17.

49. Olitski, in Moffett, “Interview of Jules Olitski, 1977.”

31. On the early years of the Iolas Gallery see Alexander the Great: The Iolas Gallery, 1955– 1987, exh. cat. (New York, NY: Paul Kasmin Gallery, 2014). Olitski recalled, “It was Fred Schneider who had heard it from Alice Baber, that Clem, at a party, said he’d seen paintings by a guy named Olitski and ‘they were good.’ ” In Geldzahler, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” 18. See also Olitski, “Clement Greenberg in My Studio,” American Art 8, nos. 3–4 (Summer– Autumn 1994): 125–129.

48. Fried, “New York Letter,” 40.

50. Olitski, “Jules Olitski,” 189.

Someone looks at an abstract painting and says, well, “what does it mean?” . . . well you’ll forgive me, but what does anything mean? You love someone, you go to bed with that person, you make love— do you pause in the middle of it and say what does it mean? — JULES OLITSKI

Basium Blush

1960

Magna acrylic on canvas

79 x 109 in. (200.7 x 276.9 cm)

In My Old Tin Lizzie

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

80 ¼ x 84 ¼ in. (203.8 x 214 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Yaksi Darling

1961

Acrylic on canvas

47 x 35 in. (119.4 x 88.9 cm)

Private Collection

Pursuit of Daphne

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

51 x 40 in. (129.5 x 101.6 cm)

After Five

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

92 ½ x 93 ½ in. (235 x 237.5 cm)

Private Collection

Yellow Juice

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

92 x 120 in. (233.7 x 304.8 cm)

Private Collection

Phantom Touch

1961

Acrylic on canvas

19 x 17 in. (48.3 x 43.2 cm)

Flying Doll

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

73 x 53 in. (185.4 x 134.6 cm)

Collection of Robert and Ana Greene

Purple Mekle Lippis

1961

Acrylic on canvas

80 x 66 Â¼ in. (203.2 x 168.3 cm)

Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Pictured from left to right: Gene Baro, Paul Feeley, David Mirvish, Clement Greenberg, Jules Olitski, Anthony Caro, and Kenneth Noland, in Nolandâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s driveway, South Shaftsbury, Vermont, summer 1966.

Fair Charlotte

1961

Acrylic on canvas

80 x 122 in. (203.2 x 309.9 cm)

Private Collection

Ishtar Bra Box

1961

Acrylic on canvas

80 x 120 in. (203.2 x 304.8 cm)

Private Collection

Passion Machine

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

63 Âź x 79 in. (160.7 x 200.7 cm)

Private Collection

The artist’s function, his reason for being, lies solely in the making of the work, the inventing of the work. — JULES OLITSKI

Prince Patutszky Pleasures

1962

Magna acrylic on canvas

89 Âž x 88 in. (228 x 223.5 cm)

Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City

The Julius Dmikhovsky Image

1961

Magna acrylic on canvas

80 x 128 Â¾ in. (203.2 x 327 cm)

Private Collection

installation view eliminate work on right of image

Pink Ishtar Belly

1962

Magna acrylic on canvas

79 ¼ x 64 ¼ in. (201.3 x 163.2 cm)

Private Collection

Thursday

1962

Acrylic on canvas

90 x 78 in. (228.6 x 198.1 cm)

Private Collection

Voyage

1962

Acrylic on canvas

82 x 94 Â½ in. (208.3 x 240 cm)

Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University

Mushroom Perfume

1962

Magna acrylic and varnish on canvas

80 x 66 in. (203.2 x 167.6 cm)

Jules Olitski in his studio, South Shaftsbury, Vermont, 1964.

Color in color is felt at any and every place of the pictorial organization; in its immediacyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;its particularity. Color must be felt throughout. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;JULES OLITSKI

Golubchik – Purple

1962

Magna acrylic and varnish on canvas

90 ¼ x 132 ¼ in. (229.2 x 335.9 cm)

Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

Cleopatra Flesh

1962

Magna acrylic on canvas

104 x 89 7â &#x201E;8 in. (264.2 x 228.3 cm)

Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York

Patutsky Passion

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

88 x 71 Â½ in. (223.5 x 181.6 cm)

Private Collection

Yankee Crooner

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

47 ¼ x 35 ¼ in. (120 x 89.5 cm)

East Seventieth Street Rapture

1962

Magna acrylic on canvas

46 x 36 Â½ in. (116.8 x 92.7 cm)

Casanova Catch

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

28 x 30 in. (71.1 x 76.2 cm)

Cadmium Orange of Doctor Frankenstein 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 90 3â &#x201E;8 x 80 in. (229.6 x 203.2 cm) Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Free Spirit

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

90 x 83 in. (228.6 x 210.8 cm)

Private Collection

Circle Stretch

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

90 x 79 Â½ in. (228.6 x 201.9 cm)

Private Collection

Age of Seventy Zohars

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

46 x 56 Â¼ in. (116.8 x 142.9 cm)

Private Collection

First Pull

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

103 x 89 Â½ in. (261.6 x 227.3 cm)

Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford

Dream Lady

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

24 Â½ x 18 in. (62.2 x 45.7 cm)

Private Collection

Love’s Dream – I

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

38 x 28 in. (96.5 x 71.1 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Wet Heat Company

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

87 x 80 in. (221 x 203.2 cm)

Private Collection

Fatal Plunge Lady

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

100 x 72 in. (254 x 182.9 cm)

Private Collection

Yaksi Juice

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

66 x 80 in. (167.6 x 203.2 cm)

Private Collection

Patutsky Jazz

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

84 Â½ x 40 in. (214.6 x 101.6 cm)

Private Collection

Beautiful Bald Woman

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

97 x 68 in. (246.4 x 172.7 cm)

Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art

Julius Green

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

67 x 91 in. (170.2 x 231.1 cm)

Private Collection

Virgin Rider

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

11 Â½ x 25 in. (29.2 x 63.5 cm)

Private Collection

Flopper

1964

Acrylic on canvas

19 Â½ x 33 in. (49.5 x 83.8 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Queen of Sheba Breast

1963

Magna acrylic on canvas

82 ¼ x 78 ¼ in. (208.9 x 198.8 cm)

Collection of Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven

Isis Dearie

1962

Magna acrylic on canvas

79 x 102 Â½ in. (200.7 x 260.4 cm)

Private Collection

Purple Casanova

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

72 x 66 1â &#x201E;3 in. (182.9 x 168.4 cm)

Shuman Collection

Pink Doozhie

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

84 x 80 in. (213.4 x 203.2 cm)

Private Collection

Joshua Jump

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

45 x 42 in. (114.3 x 106.7 cm)

Private Collection

Monkey Woman

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

66 x 72 in. (167.6 x 182.9 cm)

Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

Daphne Series â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 4

1964

Oil pastel on paper

9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm)

Daphne Series â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 8

1964

Oil pastel on paper

12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Left: Janus – 9 82

Right: Bathsheba Dream – 2

1963

Oil pastel on paper

11 7⁄8 x 8 7⁄8 in. (30.2 x 22.5 cm)

1964

Oil pastel on paper

11 7⁄8 x 8 ¾ in. (30.2 x 22.2 cm)

Private Collection

Left: Janus â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 16

1964

Oil pastel on paper

12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Right: Janus â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 17

1963

Oil pastel on paper

12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Daphne Series â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 6

1964

Oil pastel on paper

9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm)

Private Collection

Daphne Series â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 1

1964

Oil pastel on paper

9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Nitti Gritti

1964

Magna acrylic and pastel on canvas

93 Â˝ x 84 Â˝ in. (237.5 x 214.6 cm)

Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

Tea Party

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

93 x 80 in. (236.2 x 203.2 cm)

Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

Big Diagonal

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

93 ½ x 111 ½ in. (237.5 x 283.2 cm)

Estate of Jules Olitski

Miss Yellow Gorgophone

1964

Acrylic on canvas

80 x 66 in. (203.2 x 167.6 cm)

Collection of Ms. Annette Broatch

1964

Magna acrylic on canvas

96 x 72 in. (236.2 x 188 cm)

Ray and Kay Harvey Collection

JULES OLITSKI CHRONOLOGY by Alex Grimley

Fig. 1 Jules Olitski with sculpted figure, ca. 1940s.

1922–1939 On March 27, 1922, Jules Olitski is born Jevel Demikovsky in Snovsk, Soviet Russia, the only child of Jevel and Anna Demikovsky (née Zarnitskya).1 His father, a Soviet commissar, is accused of theft, brought to trial, and executed by the Soviet government in December 1921, shortly before Olitski’s birth. Following a brief stop in Gomel, Anna, her mother Freida, and the infant Jevel emigrate to the United States, settling first in Jamaica, Queens, then in Brooklyn. In 1926, Anna marries Hyman Olitsky, a widower with two sons. At age seventeen, Olitski sees paintings by Rembrandt for the first time at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. His nascent interest in art becomes an overriding passion. He draws at night (out of sight of his stepfather and stepbrothers, who disdain his interest in art); this habit of working through the night remains constant throughout his life. In high school, Olitski works with oil paint for the first time, painting landscapes en plein air around Sheepshead Bay with Russian-born Impressionist Samuel Rothbort [1882–1971]. In his final year of high school, he wins a scholarship to study drawing at the Pratt Institute, and upon graduation receives a special prize for art.

Fig.2 Jules Olitski. Woman with Purple Hand, 1950. Oil on paper mounted on board, 41 ¼ x 27 ¾ in. (104.8 x 60.3 cm). Private Collection.

1940–1949 In 1940, Olitski is admitted to the National Academy of Design on Amsterdam Avenue at 109th Street, where he studies life drawing and portrait painting with Sidney Dickinson [1890–1980]. In the evenings, he studies sculpture at the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design on East Forty-fourth Street. During this time, Olitski frequently visits museums and develops an interest in Impressionism and Fauvism. Drafted into the United States Army in 1942, Olitski becomes a U.S. citizen and legally takes his stepfather’s name, Olitsky. After being discharged in 1945, he marries Gladys Katz that same year and in 1948, his first daughter, Eve, is born. During this time, Olitski continues training in art, studying sculpture in 1947 under Chaim Gross [1902–1991] at the Educational Alliance at 197 East Broadway (fig.1). Two years later, Olitski moves to Paris on the GI Bill. Though his goal is to learn to paint in the style of the Old Masters that kindled his interest in art, he reads articles on modern art by Clement Greenberg in Partisan Review before heading to France. He studies first with sculptor Ossip Zadkine [1890–1967], then at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. He maintains a studio in Chaville, a woodsy suburb southwest of Paris, and later on the rue des Suisses, near the Plaisance metro station, in the 14th arrondissement of Paris. In an attempt to work against his now advanced academic facility, Olitski paints blindfolded, creating a series of nightmarish abstract portraits composed in bold colors and flat planes (fig.2). 1950–1959 In Paris, Olitski meets sculptor Sidney Geist, who is involved with a young American artists collective that includes Al Held and Lawrence Calcagno. Together, this group opens Galerie Huit on the Left Bank on rue Saint-Julien-lePauvre, where Olitski has his first solo exhibition in 1951, showing works developed out of his blindfold paintings. After returning to New York later that year, he studies art education at New York University, earning a Bachelor of Science in Art Education in 1952 and an MA in that field in 1954. Inspired by used drawing boards he finds in the school’s art studios, he works in 1955 on monochromatic paintings in which all pictorial incident is pushed to the edges of the picture. He explores that composition at the same time in a series of etchings. His habit of translating compositions and effects across a variety of media continues throughout his career (figs.3 and 4). The relationship between pictorial drawing and the boundaries of the picture format will remain a preoccupation of Olitski’s for decades to come.

Fig.3 Jules Olitski. Drawing Board Echo, 1952. Spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigments on canvas, 30 x 30 in. (76.2 x 76.2 cm). Private Collection. Fig.4 Jules Olitski. Drawing Number One (Third State), 1956. Soft ground etching/drypoint and aquatint from one copper plate, 4 7⁄8 x 5 7⁄8 in. (12.4 x 14.9 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

Though he occasionally exhibits work in group shows around New York—at Roko Gallery and the City Center Art Gallery—his work remains virtually unknown. While teaching art at SUNY New Paltz during 1954–55, Olitski continues working towards his doctoral degree at NYU, where he serves as curator of the University’s Art Education Gallery, later to become the Grey Art Gallery. In 1956, he joins the faculty of the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University in Greenvale, New York, where he becomes Chairman of the Fine Arts Department. He marries his second wife, Andrea Olitsky (née Pearce) in January 1956 then moves to Long Island—first to Oyster Bay, where his daughter Lauren is born in 1957, then on to Northport. He spends that summer with his family at Sister Island on Lake Wentworth in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, and sets up a studio on nearby Stamp Act Island, returning there annually until the early 1970s. Eager to have his paintings shown in New York, Olitski meets with gallerists Charles Egan, John Bernard Myers, and Elinor Poindexter, each of whom compliments and encourages his work but is unwilling to exhibit it. Desperate for an exhibition, Olitski hatches a plan, recounted in his essay “My First New York Show”: I would invent an artist: the more dramatic his history, the better. A kind of ghost artist: no one could ever see him in the flesh but me. So then: Jevel Demikov, a talented young Soviet artist. . . . At the college [C.W. Post], I scheduled an exhibition called L’École de Paris Aujourd’hui. I borrowed paintings for the exhibition from some of the galleries in New York. . . . When the show ended I drove to the city to return the paintings. My first stop, as it happened, was the Alexander Iolas Gallery. [Reading the exhibition checklist, Iolas] stops short and looks at me. “Who is this Demikov?” . . . I bring the paintings in and lean them against a wall. . . . Finally Iolas stands, straightens up, turns around, looks me in the eye, and says: “You’re right. He’s a genius. We must have a show.” [Finding that Iolas is unwilling to exhibit work without meeting the elusive Demikov, a frantic Olitski thinks:] What to do? Tell the truth. There’s no other way. But I can’t say it in English. I give a sign and say, “Alors, Demikov, c’est moi.” I think at that moment Mr. Iolas was not sure [whether] I was an escaped Russian or a lunatic American. About eight months later Mr. Iolas gave me first my New York show.2 Fig.5 Postcard from Clement Greenberg to Jules Olitski, dated April 10, 1958 (recto and verso).

Fig.6 Jules Olitski. Whore of Babylon,1958. Spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigments on canvas, 73 x 59 in. (185.4 x 149.8 cm). Collection of David and Audrey Mirvish, Toronto. Fig.7 Jules Olitski. Mushroom Joy, 1959. Magna acrylic on canvas, 68 1⁄8 x 80 in. (173 x 203.2 cm). Private Collection.

His work is shown in Iolas’s contemporary art space, the Zodiac Room, in 1958. The gallery misspells his name as “Olitski,” which the artist subsequently retains. From a friend, he hears that Clement Greenberg had seen the show and spoken favorably about it. Olitski writes to the critic who responds with an invitation to visit (fig.5). After their meeting, Greenberg invites him to participate in a December 1958 group show at French & Company. The following May, Olitski has a solo show at that gallery, exhibiting twenty-six paintings from the previous year. Painted mostly in shades of gray and earthen browns and reds, their massive, impastoed forms and bold figure/ ground compositions are unlike the allover gestural abstractions of his Parisian peers Al Held and Joan Mitchell. The surfaces of his paintings are dense and sculptural, comprised of spackle, acrylic resin, and dry pigment (fig.6). Shortly after this exhibition, Olitski makes a significant change in his painting practice. While still drawing inspiration from organic shapes in general and the female form in particular, he begins using boldly colored dyes to stain the canvas weave (fig.7).

Fig.8 Installation view of Osculum Silence (1960) in Recent Acquisitions; at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 20, 1962–January 13, 1963.

Fig.10 Jules Olitski exhibition at the Galleria Santa Croce, Florence, February 1963. Left to right: Untitled – Thirteen (1963); Lucy’s Fancy (1960) hung vertically; and Doll Walker (1961) hung horizontally.

1960–1964 In his second solo exhibition at French & Company, in the spring of 1960, Olitski shows seventeen of his recent dye paintings. Shortly after, the gallery closes its contemporary program, and Olitski is taken on by Elinor Poindexter (fig.12). In 1961, his painting Osculum Silence wins an award at the Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture (renamed in 1982 as the Carnegie International) held at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh. The painting is bought by G. David Thompson and gifted to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, soon after (fig.8). Subsequently, he shifts from dyes to acrylic paints, Liquitex and Magna. Though he thins Magna with turpentine and paints with sponges and rollers, Olitski’s paintings of the early 1960s are unlike those of other artists using the “soak-stain” technique. He avoids autographic gesture as well as symmetry and geometry, using ovoid and elliptical forms. His palette comprises contrasting tertiary colors: salmon next to chartreuse, lavender against lemon yellow, teal bands orbiting mauve on a turquoise background—hues pungent, tart, and saccharine by turns (fig.9). Olitski’s concern, art critic Michael Fried observes, Fig.9 Announcement card for Jules Olitski exhibition, Royal Made, Yellow, at Poindexter Gallery, New York, 1962, is with “mutually repulsive rather than attractive relations with Olitski’s re-titling of The Julius Dmikhovsky Image. between colors.”3 His persistence in challenging the limits of “good” or “acceptable” taste mirrors that of contemporaneous Pop artists. In 1962, Greenberg notes the “shocked distaste” that Olitski’s work elicits in the art world.4 Nevertheless, his cellular-form stain paintings are shown in three exhibitions throughout Italy in 1963 (fig.10). By this time he has pushed his painting toward two opposite extremes: in pictures such as Golubchik – Purple and The Prince Patutszky – Red (both 1962), curving and organic forms are magnified, seeming alternately to extend past, or emerge from, the edges of the canvas; at the same time, in paintings like Dream Lady (1963) and One Time (1964), colors are suspended within or framed by expanses of unpainted canvas (fig.11). In both manners, Olitski’s overriding concern is with the bounding edges of the canvas. In 1963, Olitski joins the faculty of Bennington College. Located in rural southern Vermont, Bennington in the 1960s is an outpost for art and literature—painter Paul Feeley heads the visual arts department, which includes British sculptor Anthony Caro and, occasionally, painter Kenneth Noland. Bernard Malamud and Howard Nemerov teach in the literature department. Olitski purchases an early nineteenth-century Federal-style home in nearby South Shaftsbury. He moves two barns behind the house together to create his largest studio space to date (fig.13).The following year, he is included in Post-Painterly Abstraction, a forward-looking exhibition curated by

Fig.11 Installation view of the exhibition Ausstellung Signale at Kunsthalle Basel, June 26– September 5, 1965. Left to right: The Prince Patutszky – Red (1962) and One Time (1964). Fig.12 Poster for Jules Olitski, exhibition at Poindexter Gallery, New York, March 10– March 28, 1964. Fig.13 Jules Olitski in front of his home, South Shaftsubury, Vermont, 1966.

Clement Greenberg for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In his catalogue essay, Greenberg emphasizes the “openness and clarity” of design and “high keying [and] lucidity” of color common to recent abstract painting.5 Olitski’s paintings of 1963–64 continue his exploration of color forms and their relation to the boundaries of the canvas; though his compositions have become more straightforward, their visual effects are manifold. In Fatal Plunge Lady (1963, Pl. p.67) and other “Curtain” paintings, contrasts in color remain brilliant and dramatic despite disparities in size, as the trajectory of the forms guides one’s eye down the canvas. One of his main concerns is to seamlessly blend different shades, like the darkening blues of Fatal Plunge (fig.14), or contrasting hues into one another, as in the dramatic shift from viridian to red in Emma Amour (fig.15). Olitski’s “Curtain” paintings are showcased in Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella, an exhibition curated by Michael Fried at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum in 1965. In his catalogue essay, Fried rigorously details the pictorial innovations of Olitski’s pictures and their implications for future abstract painting. Between 1964 and 1966, Olitski establishes relationships with several dealers that will represent him for decades to come—John Kasmin in London, David Mirvish in Toronto, and Andre Emmerich and Lawrence Rubin in New York.

Fig.14 Jules Olitski. Fatal Plunge, 1963. Magna acrylic on canvas, 97 x 68 in. (246.4 x 172.7 cm). Collection of the Saint Louis Art Museum.

Fig.15 Jules Olitski. Emma Amour, 1964. Enamel and pastel on canvas, 137 x 82 in. (347.9 x 208.2 cm). Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto.

1965–1969 At Bennington, Olitski and Caro bring a group of students to visit Kenneth Noland’s studio (fig.16). Caro says “that what he wants to emphasize in his sculpture is the materiality, the density of the medium.” Olitski replies, half-jokingly, that “what I was looking for was the complete opposite: a spray of color in the air that stayed there, suspended. Just that.”6 Haunted by this vision, Olitski acquires an air compressor spray gun and embarks on a new method of painting. He lays a length of unstretched, unsized canvas on the floor and sprays colors into each other and across the surface, determining the size and shape of the painting afterward by cropping the edges from the larger canvas. The abrupt color transitions and discrete shapes in his stained “Curtain” paintings of 1964 give way in the spray paintings to interpenetrations of dense shadow and diaphanous light, volume and mass, pictorial space, and material surface. The sprayed surfaces of Olitski’s paintings “[contrive] an illusion of depth that somehow extrudes all suggestions of depth back to the picture’s surface,” Greenberg writes. “It is as if that surface, in all its literalness, were enlarged to contain a world of color and light differentiations impossible to flatness but which yet manage not to violate flatness.”7

Fig.16 Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland in the latter’s home, South Shaftsbury, Vermont, 1964.

Fig.17 Helen Frankenthaler (center) on gondola with (clockwise from bottom left) Lady Dufferin and Sheridan Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 5th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, Jules Olitski, gondolier, Anthony Caro, John Kasmin, and Richard Smith, Venice, Italy, 1966.

Fig.18 Jules Olitski. Pink Alert, 1966. Acrylic on canvas, 113 x 80 in. (287 x 203.2 cm). Collection of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Fig.19 Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, April 1969, front cover showing detail of the sculpture Heartbreak of Ronald and William (1968).

Having escaped the inevitability of linear drawing in his spray paintings, Olitski recognizes that the edge of the canvas is itself an act of drawing—a painting’s “outer edge is inescapable,” he writes. “I recognize the line it declares as drawing. This line delineates and separates the painting from the space around, and appears to be on the wall.”8 To this end, Olitski experiments with different manners of enunciating that line, primarily by reiterating the outer edge inside the painting, along its perimeter, with contrasting color in pastel or impasto. In February 1966, Olitski is one of four American artists selected by the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Curator of American Art Henry Geldzahler to exhibit at the XXXIII Venice Biennial that June (fig.17). Early the following year, his spray painting Pink Alert (fig.18) wins first prize at the 30th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, where his first solo museum exhibition is held later that spring. In June 1967, Olitski moves to 323 West Twenty-first Street in Chelsea, setting up a studio there shortly after. Throughout the late 1960s, Olitski experiments with paints of heightened viscosity and with broader spray gun nozzles that can be adjusted from a fine mist to a large splatter. These materials yield paint surfaces that are increasingly thick and opaque. In other paintings of this period, he adds pearlescent powder or varnish to the pigment in order to create surfaces that radiate like neon. En route to the French Riviera in the summer of 1968, Olitski stops in London to visit Anthony Caro, who encourages him to try his hand in that medium. With Caro’s help, he finds an unused factory in St. Neots, a small village twenty miles east of Cambridge, and works there with sheets of fabricated aluminum—a material light enough for him to handle, move around, and compose. He completes twenty sculptures in seven weeks between July and September. Geldzahler visits him in St. Neots and, impressed with the work, offers Olitski an exhibition of the sculptures. When The Sculpture of Jules Olitski opens in April 1969, Olitski becomes the first living American artist to be given a solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig.19). 1970–1979 In the summer of 1970, Olitski works with the Chiron Press to execute a series of silkscreens.The ten completed prints are published as Graphics Suite #1 and Graphics Suite #2 by Waddington Graphics in London. Commenting on these works, the art critic and curator Karen Wilkin observes that “Olitski seems to have treated the silkscreen process as a tool not unlike his spray gun: a mechanical means of producing a visual effect that is in no way mechanical.”9 In the spring of 1971, Olitski moves his studio to a large loft at 827 Broadway, just south of Union Square. Museum of Modern Art curator William Rubin and painter Paul Jenkins also reside in this building. Olitski experiments with newly developed acrylic gels, which he uses to stiffen and seal the canvas surface, and with polymers that extend opaque paints into translucent glazes. Using rollers and squeegees, he works in a drab palette of neutral colors on thin, subtly inflected membrane-like surfaces (figs.20 and 21).

Fig.20 Jules Olitski in his Broadway studio, New York City, February 1974. Fig.21 Jules Olitski and William Rubin in Olitski’s Broadway studio, 1974.

In the fall of 1973, Olitski gifts his South Shaftsbury home to Bennington College in exchange for lifetime use of a property the college owns in North Bennington, the Ludlow Bunkhouse, where he works on sculpture throughout the 1970s (fig.22).10 He works briefly with mild steel before switching to Corten; as in his early 1960s paintings, circular forms predominate. While the earliest “Ring” sculptures, completed in the summer of 1972, rise only ten inches off the ground, the next series develops in height to over five feet (fig.23). Later in the decade he stacks sheets of corrugated, curved, and arcing steel in configurations up to ten feet high.This body of work is the subject of a museum exhibition that travels from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, to the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, in 1977 (fig.24). Olitski’s first full retrospective is organized by Kenworth Moffett in April 1973.The exhibition premiers at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, then travels to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, before concluding at the Pasadena Art Museum in California (fig.25). Reviewing the exhibition in Time magazine, Robert Hughes asserts that “Olitski is a force to be reckoned with. He has next to no public face, for he prefers the quiet of his huge loft-studio on lower Broadway—out of which comes an undistracted flow of work.”11 Thomas Hess observes the paradoxes evident in Olitski’s work: “between chance and control . . . between the substantial and the ephemeral.” The artist is positioned “at the interface of history—between the Old World and the New, Demikovsky and Olitski, old-master virtuosity and color-field modernism.”12 After his divorce from Andrea Olitsky, he purchases a home on Bear Island on Lake Winnipesaukee near Meredith, New Hampshire. In 1974, he completes the construction of a large studio on the property, working there through the summer and fall. In a rush of creative energy and experimental curiosity, Olitski begins working in several painterly manners at once, employing an ever-expanding variety of acrylic mediums to thin the consistency or thicken the texture of his paint (fig.26). He uses mops, brooms, and trowels to pour and spread materials.The paintings increasingly resemble natural phenomena—luminosity, cascades, erosion. As in nature, the effects that emerge in these paintings are as diverse and multitudinous as they are particular and miniscule. Two senses of painterly scale—broad gesture and infinitesimal detail—operate simultaneously, each reinforcing the

Fig.25 Installation view of Jules Olitski traveling retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, September 7–November 4, 1973. Left to right: C + J + B (1966), Third Indomitable (1970), and Fifth Omsk Pleasure (1972). Fig.26 Jules Olitski in his Broadway studio, New York City, November 1972.

Fig.22 Jules Olitski, Clement Greenberg, and Kenneth Noland in Olitski’s North Bennington sculpture studio (Ludlow Bunkhouse), Vermont, ca. 1970s. Fig.23 Jules Olitski standing inside sculpture in progress (Greenberg Variations), South Shaftsbury, Vermont, 1974. Fig.24 Shechinah Temptations (1976) on the front cover of the catalogue for Jules Olitski: New Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 1977.

Fig.27 Jules Olitski. Repahim Shade – 2, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 90 ½ x 120 in. (229.9 x 304.8 cm). Private Collection.

other by coincidence and contrast. Between 1974 and 1975, his most prolific years, Olitski explained, “methods and techniques I’d abandoned, such as underpainting, modeling, half-tones, impasto, chiaroscuro, tinting, glazing, and so forth, found their way back into my work”(figs.27 and 28).13 During the mid- to late 1970s, he spends half the year (roughly April through October or November) in New Hampshire, and the other half in New York City. Early in 1975, he meets Kristina Gorby (née Fourgis), whom he will marry five years later, on February 29, 1980. Accepting an award from the University of South Carolina, Columbia, in March 1975, Olitski offers what amounts to an artist statement: The artist’s function, his reason for being, lies solely in the making of the work, the inventing of the work. The painter strives to make [his vision] real by what he does with the materials available to him. Every decision the painter makes must be in accord with the attempt to realize that vision—the vision he has of what painting is, or must be. I mean this in even the most prosaic sense: the choice of kinds of paint, colors, medium, brushes, canvas, or possibly paint rollers, mops, sponges, or whatever.The selection of materials and what is done with them are all in the service of the artist’s vision, dictated by that vision. . . . So I think curiosity, the urge to discover, the incitement of a major challenge, the will to impose one’s artistic vision so that we all see and experience differently than before—all these have to do with making art.14

His momentum continues into 1976, as he shows stoneware and clay works made in Syracuse at the invitation of ceramic artist and curator Marjorie Hughto. He exhibits life drawings at Noah Goldowsky Gallery in New York, works on steel sculpture in the summer, and has solo exhibitions of paintings in Toronto, Vienna, New York, and Houston. He purchases a home on Islamorada, Florida, in the Florida Keys, in April 1978. After closing his Broadway studio in 1980, Olitski will continue to spend spring, summer, and autumn on Bear Island and winter in Florida for the rest of his life. In a review near the end of the 1970s, acclaimed poet and art critic John Ashbery muses about Olitski’s increasingly lush and sensuous recent work: By now any doubt as to [Olitski’s] position as one of our leading abstract painters should be swept away by the sheer weight and authority of [his recent] paintings. . . . [O]ne sign of Olitski’s genius, I think, is that he makes it almost impossible to describe his work in words. Colors, shapes, textures, demand a vocabulary that doesn’t exist yet, and perhaps never will—a sure sign that the life of this work is in the work itself and not in danger of being drained out of it by critics. His new paintings, especially, stake out a claim to a territory that is beyond criticism, a place that looks like outer space but is also as near and as lively as dreams.15

Fig.28 Jules Olitski. Third Manchu, 1974. Acrylic on canvas, 84 x 49 in. (213.4 x 124.5 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

Fig.29 Jules Olitski. Second Broom of Joseph, 1980. Acrylic on canvas, 38 x 89 ½ in. (96.5 x 227.3 cm.) Private Collection.

Fig.30 Jules Olitski. Padua Rim, 1985. Acrylic on canvas, 67 ½ x 35 in. (171.4 x 88.9 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

Fig.31 Jules Olitski. Silent Pass, 1986. Acrylic and oil-based enamel on Plexiglas, 49 x 79 in. (124.4 x 200.7 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski.

1980–1989 In his paintings of the early to mid-1980s, Olitski continues to refine and extend the techniques developed in the previous decade in colors increasingly moody and dramatic. Though he continues to work with brooms, mops, spray guns, squeegees, and other unconventional tools, he isolates certain painterly effects more separately in narrow-formatted canvases. For example, one broad sweep of ultramarine blue covers most of the surface of Second Broom of Joseph (1980); it shifts in luminosity as a coating of black spray thins to a haze across the surface (fig.29). The use of darkly colored sprays as sfumato (that is, the softening of color transitions without lines or borders) and softly glowing lambent surfaces characterize Olitski’s work of this period (fig.30). In 1983, Riva Yares mounts her first exhibition of Olitski’s work in Scottsdale, Arizona. She recalls her first meeting with the artist: When I arrived at the island, there was Olitski, a large man with soft eyes, holding a big glass of Scotch, at ten in the morning. I liked him immediately. . . . He was just about to go to sleep, as it was his habit to work at night and sleep during the day. We met again for dinner, and then after dinner everybody went to sleep except Olitski and me. We stayed by the dinner table and talked all night. . . . We shared the awe of nature’s wonder, spoke of doing things by intuition and feeling.16

Fig.32 Jules Olitski. Rake’s Progress – 4, 1987. Acrylic and oil-based enamel on Plexiglas, 69 x 69 in. (175.3 x 175.3 cm). Private Collection.

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Anna Olitsky, his mother, dies in October 1982. In the summer of 1984, Olitski’s work is the subject of a retrospective at the Fondation du Château de Jau in Perpignan, in the center of the Roussillon plain on the Mediterranean coast. The following spring, several of his paintings are shown in Grand Compositions, a selection of art from the collection of David Mirvish exhibited at the Fort Worth Art Museum. In 1986, he begins painting almost exclusively on irregularly shaped sheets of Plexiglas, spreading pastel hues into frosty metallic pigments and iridescent gels, slathering them across the surface in dense and opaque configurations. Sprays of dark pigment yield areas of shadow and spatial recession (fig.31). In January of that year, Yares Gallery stages a retrospective of his work, showing over thirty-five paintings of the previous two decades. In 1987, with a series of works on tinted, mirrored Plexiglas, Olitski mounts his most aggressive challenge yet to “good” or “acceptable” taste. Despite their radical and unprecedented appearance, these paintings allow Olitski to continue in his pursuit of radiant color and light that seem to glow from within. In Rake’s Progress – 4 (fig.32), for example, Olitski smears and smudges lipstick reds and gaudy splatters of pearlescent white over a reflective sapphire-blue diamond of Plexiglas. Concurrently, he completes a series of sculptures in Plexiglas painted with acrylic and enamel; their stacks of corrugated and arcing forms are reminiscent of his works of the late 1970s, though smaller in size than his earlier

sculpture. They are shown at Galerie Wentzel in Cologne, Yares Gallery in Scottsdale, and Andre Emmerich in New York (fig.33). During the next several years, many of them are translated into mild steel. Olitski is commissioned by Philadelphia’s Institute of Contemporary Art to execute an edition of prints for their 1986 fundraiser. He collaborates with printers at the Brandywine Workshop, where he will return for their Visiting Artist Series to create five subsequent print editions over the next three years. These and earlier prints are collected in a retrospective organized by the Associated American Artists gallery in New York later in the decade. Olitski is appointed Milton Avery Distinguished Visiting Professor at Bard College in the fall of 1987, where, it is reported, he speaks in “lucid, unpretentious terms . . . humble in approach, rich in wit and genuine in intent,” telling students to “use intuition, intelligence, experience, and inspiration to make art, but not to think too much about the process of creating.”17 (fig.34) In 1988, Olitski brings into the studio a painter’s mitt that his wife had purchased to paint an iron fence on their property. The mitten is made of fuzzy polyester and textured like a paint roller. He uses it to spread an array of warm-toned hues, iridescent metallic pigments, thick acrylic gels, and newly developed interference colors into one another. Interference paints are transparent and pearlescent, shifting in hue and radiance in relation to the light that is refracted through them. Blending the pigments into thick applications of transparent gel allows light to pass through and stay captured within the paint surface. When this light reflects back outward, the pigments “interfere” with its color and luminosity.18 Olitski’s painterly gestures remain legible throughout the “Mitt” pictures; he sculpts the effulgent paint surface into hairpin crests and ridges.To amplify effects of space and volume, he sprays the painting with dark pigment laterally and from a low angle, where it catches the contours of the surface and accumulates arounds its ridges. From different angles a single gesture seems alternately to shimmer and glow or to curl into darkness, engulfed by shadow (fig.35). Though Olitski’s magisterial paintings of the late 1980s are little understood by critics, Sidney Tillim contextualizes them in the main currents of 1980s art world in an article entitled “Ideology and Difference,” writing:

Fig.33 Announcement for Jules Olitski: New Sculpture at Andre Emmerich Gallery, March 1987. Return of Ea (1986) shown on cover. Fig.34 Jules Olitski in his studio, Islamorada, Florida, 1985.

The way things work ideologically today, Koons’s stuff is supposed to represent the last word in postmodernism’s disposal of the modernist kind of thing made by Olitski, which is perceived as lacking social and political resonance, not to mention its alleged formal conservatism. But they are both rapturously anarchic artists . . . , [sharing] an aptitude for color and texture that are wondrously tawdry in different ways, but which are identical as metaphors of absolutized sensation, literalizations of uncommon taste.The hysterical reaction against Koons . . . has not, as I write, resulted in any grateful acknowledgement that Olitski upholds just those values that Koons’s critics feel he has debased. Precisely, Olitski is just as subversive an artist, in that he continues to flaunt his taste as a way of preserving art from the blandness that has been its usual destiny as the bourgeois decades accumulate.19

Fig.35 Jules Olitski. Eternity Domain, 1989. Acrylic on canvas, 68 x 107 in. (172.7 x 271.8 cm). Private Collection.

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Fig.36 Jules Olitski. Flare, 1993. Acrylic on canvas, 40 x 48 in. (101.6 x 121.9 cm). Private Collection.

Fig.37 Jules Olitski working with master printer Catherine Mosley on the aquatint Beauty of Angels in his Bear Island Studio, on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, August 1989.

Fig.38 Jules Olitski. Eos Flow, 1996. Watercolor and pastel on all rag paper, 22 x 30 in. (55.9 x 76.2 cm). Private Collection.

1990–1999 Olitski continues working in the manner of the “Mitt” paintings, finding affirmation and inspiration in his experience of the work of Old Masters, especially El Greco, whose Virgin of the Immaculate Conception (1607–1613) affects him profoundly during a trip to Spain in 1990. Asked about the changes in his work over the past decade, Olitski stresses the continuity of his vision, explaining that “one thing leads to another. . . . [I]n making the work, sometimes something unexpected happens. And I don’t know what to make of it. I’m made restless by it and I have to do it more and see what happens. And that, in turn, leads to a seemingly new development. But it’s all in [the] context of a vision, of making it real.”20 The painterly gestures in Olitski’s “Mitt” paintings were expansive; by contrast, his 1993–94 paintings, though they resemble the earlier “Mitt” pictures, are chaotic and compressed. In these paintings, afferent scrawls of pale, close-valued, metallic tones are splattered with pigments that contrast starkly in color and texture, giving the impression, as painter Walter Darby Bannard observes, “that the whole set of marks is hanging in mid-air, suspended . . . .”21 (fig.36). In the spring of 1994, Olitski, Kenneth Noland, and Anthony Caro are invited to participate in the Hartford Art School’s International Distinguished Artists Symposium, where they give master classes for students and lectures for the public. Olitski works in Hartford’s print studio, completing a series of abstract monoprints, a medium that he will continue to explore for the next decade (fig.37). Eventually, he has a printmaking studio built next to his main studio on Bear Island, where he shifts to monotyping—the most direct manner of printmaking, well-suited to his experimental, intuitive style. By chance he sees a postcard reproduction of Eugène Delacroix’s oil painting La mer à Dieppe (The Sea at Dieppe),1852, in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which catalyzes and affirms his impulse to paint from nature. “I was seized by this painting,” he says. “Somehow it gave me heart that I could do this.”22 As it happens, both his Bear Island studio and his Islamorada home are waterfront and west facing. He converts a small porch in his New Hampshire house into a watercolor studio, and, in a surge of creative energy, begins painting landscapes and seascapes both real and imagined. Working on paper in watercolor, pastel, oil stick, and gouache, as well as acrylics on canvas, Olitski dedicates virtually all his energy to work in landscape for the next several years (fig.38). Though the scale and subject of his work seems to have changed dramatically, Olitski makes little distinction between abstraction and representation. “I sense reality as a kind of flow, emerging from a core,” he says. “My job as an artist is to give it life. It’s the vision of the artist, the core. I think of something G.K. Chesterton wrote, ‘Behind every artist’s mind there is a certain pattern, an architecture, a design. It’s a thing, like the landscape of his dreams.’ For all artists, no matter the medium, the vision expresses his reality.”23 To that end, he brings the same spirit and passion to his small-scale landscapes on paper as to paintings several times that size.24 Olitski’s work slides seamlessly between abstract and representational modes, often blending the two together in a painterly synthesis of naturalistic effects. The radiant sun suspended near the center of Hierarchy of Light (1998, fig.39) resonates as naturalism as much as the dramatic abstract tenebroso of Once in Segovia (1999, fig.40).The attitudes common to art made in the 1990s are ironic distance and abject debasement. In contrast, Olitski’s landscapes are romantic, resplendent—the work of a man standing in awe and humility before Creation.25 Of Olitski’s landscapes Michael Fried writes, “There is not the merest touch of ego to be seen.”26

Fig.39 Jules Olitski. Hierarchy of Light, 1998. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in. (152.4 x 182.9 cm). Private Collection. Fig.40 Jules Olitski. Once in Segovia, 1999. Acrylic on canvas, 36 x 48 in. (91.4 x 121.9 cm). Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto.

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2000–2007 Following a diagnosis of lung cancer in September 1999, Olitski undergoes chemotherapy, radiation, and, ultimately, a major surgery in January 2000. He emerges from the operation positively vital, returning to his studio soon after and embarking on paintings in which the glimmering sunrises and sunsets of his landscape pictures are transformed into massive orbs of bold color, molten and mottled, set among empyrean fields. Though he continues to create landscapes on paper for the rest of his life, his paintings remain entirely abstract. There is little trace of the artist’s hand in these paintings; they seem to thunder forth with cosmic energy. The 2002 series title “With Love and Disregard” captures the vision behind Olitski’s late work, in which he “gives us nothing but paint, paint applied with reckless disdain for our learned ideas of what a painting should look like”(fig.41).27 In Temptation: Yellow (2002), ferociously contrasting colors boil across a stormy surface, with rumbling textures cracking open, electrified. The painting’s energy seems unbounded (fig.42). Nevertheless, Olitski is an artist against his time. For decades he has worked by the seventeenth-century French painter Nicolas Poussin’s mantra, “The goal of art is delight.” In his unyielding quest for aesthetic delight, or “pleasure,” he recognizes his countercultural position. “One risks being called a fascist for seeking excellence and having pleasure in the beautiful,” he warned. “[Quality] simply isn’t democratic. It attacks the modern perception of equality, diversity, multiculturalism . . . .”28 Likening the situation to the “Roman circuses of old,” he observes, “Abominations are the order of the day. . . . The public must be fed its daily outrage.”29 As insouciant in his abstract painting as he is romantic in his landscapes, Olitski makes his love for art and disregard for orthodoxy inspirational: “Creative energy can thrive when there is a culture to go up against.”30 In addition to his resurgent painting practice, he continues working in a variety of traditional media: painting and drawing from nature; making monotypes, life drawings, and sculpture; aiming always to create art of the highest caliber (fig.43). “What motivates the art that presently prevails?” he wonders. “I suppose a hatred for our traditions, for excellence, a reflexive self-hate. . . . In the face of our present culture, I say to myself, ‘Expect nothing. Do your work. Celebrate!’”31 Olitski continues working until the end of his life. “Toward the very end, in the hospital” Michael Fried recounts, “one of Jules’s doctors asked him whether or not he wanted heroic measures taken to extend his life. ‘Of course I do,’ Jules is supposed to have said. ‘I still have work to do.’ ”32 Jules Olitski dies on February 4, 2007, aged 84.

Fig.41 Jules Olitski. With Love and Disregard: Zeus, 2002. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 84 in. (152.4 x 213.4 cm). Collection of the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. Fig.42 Jules Olitski. Temptation: Yellow, 2002. Acrylic on canvas, 60 x 72 in. (152.4 x 182.9 cm). Estate of Jules Olitski. Fig.43 Jules Olitski in his Bear Island studio, on Lake Winnipesaukee, New Hampshire, September 2005.

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My thanks to Lauren Olitski Poster for her generous energies and collaborative spirit. Her encyclopedic memory was invaluable to this project. In addition, I have made use of the chronology by Elinor L. Woron and Kenworth Moffett in Moffett’s 1981 monograph on Jules Olitski. 1. The Demikovsky family was originally from Gomel in present-day Belarus, then part of Soviet Russia. Their move to Snovsk may have been prompted by the elder Jevel’s being stationed there in his role as a commissar, or due to his arrest and imprisonment. 2. Jules Olitski, “My First New York Show,” Partisan Review, vol. 56, no. 1 (Winter 1989): 34–44. 3. Michael Fried, “Jules Olitski,” in Art & Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 136. 4. Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, ed. John O’Brian, vol. 4, Modernism with a Vengeance 1957–1969 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 34.

15. John Ashbery, “John Cage and Jules Olitski,” in Reported Sightings: Art Chronicles 1957– 1987, ed. David Bergman (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989), 223–224 16. Riva Yares, excerpts compiled from Jules Olitski Selected Paintings: 1962–1985, A Retrospective View, exh. cat. (Scottsdale, AZ: Yares Gallery, 1986), 2; and “In Memory of Jules Olitski,” in Jules Olitski: Radiance + Reflection, exh. cat. (Santa Fe, NM: Yares Art Projects, 2013), n.p. 17. Florence Panella, “Jules Olitski, Bard’s Distinguished Professor…” Poughkeepsie Journal, October 13, 1987, 13A. 18. For this description, I am indebted to Darryl Hughto for his technical expertise. 19. Sidney Tillim, “Ideology and Difference,” Arts, March 1989, 48–51, edited for clarity. 20. Jules Olitski, “Interview with Jules Olitski,” Gauthier, 77–78, edited for clarity.

5. Greenberg, “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, 196.

21. Walter Darby Bannard, “Jules Olitski at the New Gallery,” in Olitski (Miami, FL: University of Miami, 1994), n.p.

6. Jules Olitski, “An Interview with Jules Olitski,” by Louise Gauthier, Perspectives 8 (Spring 1990): 78.

22. Jules Olitski, “Jules Olitski,” interviewed by William V. Ganis, Art Criticism, vol. 14, no. 1 (1999): 40.

7. Greenberg, “Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale,” in Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4, 230.

23. Jules Olitski, “Expect Nothing, Do Your Work, Celebrate: Derek Sprawson talks to Jules Olitski,” in Jules Olitski (Nottingham, UK: Future Factory Far Ahead, 2000), 14.

8. Jules Olitski, “Painting in Color,” reprinted in Jules Olitski by Kenworth Moffett (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 214.

24. Olitski, “Jules Olitski,” interviewed by Ganis, 39.

9. Karen Wilkin, “The Prints of Jules Olitski,” in The Prints of Jules Olitski: A Catalogue Raisonné 1954–1989 (New York, NY: Associated American Artists, 1989), 13. 10. Bennington College sold the South Shaftsbury residence within a couple years. Subsequently, the College decided in 1988 that Olitski’s “lifetime use” of the Ludlow Bunkhouse should come to an end. 11. Robert Hughes, “Color in the Mist,” Time, July 16, 1973. 12. Thomas B. Hess, “Olitski Without Flattery,” New York, October 1, 1973, 77. 13. Jules Olitski, “The Courage of Conviction,” in The Courage of Conviction, ed. Phillip L. Berman (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1985), 189. 14. Jules Olitski, “Speech delivered at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, March 27, 1975,” in Olitski by Moffett, 218–220, edited for clarity.

25. “I believe in a Creator. . . . Of course, nothing can be proven about the existence of the Creator. I can have no certainty, only belief,” Olitski wrote in “The Courage of Conviction.” 26. Michael Fried, “Fields of Color,” Artforum, April 2007, 56. 27. Walter Darby Bannard was describing Olitski’s 1993–-94 paintings, but the description is perhaps even more apt for the later work. Bannard, Olitski, n.p. 28. Jules Olitski, “Barley Soup and Art—High and Low,” contribution to “What Happened to the Arts?” Partisan Review, vol. 69, no. 4 (Fall 2002): 607. 29. Ibid. 30. Jules Olitski, “How My Art Gets Made,” Partisan Review, vol. 68, no. 4 (Fall 2001): 623. 31. Olitski, “Barley Soup and Art,” 609; and “How My Art Gets Made,” 623. 32. Fried, “Fields of Color,” in Artforum, April 2007, 56.

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Judith Juice

1965

Acrylic on canvas

99 ¾ x 69 ½ in. (253.4 x 176.5 cm)

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106

Colour Flow

1965

Acrylic and pastel on canvas

90 x 85 in. (228.6 x 215.9 cm)

Solomonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Song

1966

Magna acrylic on canvas

95 x 68 in. (241.3 x 172.7 cm)

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SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS 2020 Jules Olitski—Color to the Core, Paintings: 1960–1964, Yares Art, New York, NY

2016 Jules Olitski: Plexiglas, 1986, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY

2015 Jules Olitski: On the Edge, A Decade of Innovation, Leslie Feely, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: Passages, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London Jules Olitski, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI Jules Olitski, Marianne Friedland Gallery, Naples, FL

Eyes on Olitski: Selections from the Permanent Collection, Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, SUNY, NY

2014 Jules Olitski: Mitt Paintings, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY

2001 Jules Olitski: New Work on Paper and Intimate Paintings, Ameringer Howard Yohe, Boca Raton, Fl

Olitski Visions, installation at Tower 49, Kato International, 12 E 49 St, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: New Works on Paper, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI

Jules Olitski on An Intimate Scale, Luther W. Brady Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, DC. Traveled to the: Reading Museum, Reading, PA; Freedman Art, New York, NY

Jules Olitski Recent Paintings, Dorothy Blau Gallery, Bay Harbor Isle, FL

2013 Jules Olitski, Radiance + Reflection: Stain Paintings & Drawings 1960–1964, Yares Projects, Santa Fe, NM 2012 Jules Olitski: An American Master, Meredith Long & Company, Houston, TX 2011–12 Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO. Traveled to the: Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH; American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, Washington, DC; Naples Philharmonic Museum, Naples, FL 2010 Jules Olitski Embracing Circles, Hackett Mill, San Francisco, and Freedman Art, New York, NY 2008–2011 Jules Olitski: An Inside View, A Survey of Prints 1954–2006, Brattleboro Museum & Art Center, Brattleboro, VT. Traveled to the: Weatherspoon Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, NC; Luther W. Brady Art Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, DC; The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH; Opalka Gallery, The Sage Colleges of Albany, New York, NY; The Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Daura Gallery, Lynchburg College, VA 2007 Jules Olitski—The Late Paintings: A Celebration, Knoedler & Company, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Selected Paintings and Sculpture from the 1980s, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL 2006 Jules Olitski: Works on Paper, The Luther W. Brady Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, DC Jules Olitski The Seventies: Painting and Sculpture, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY 2005 Jules Olitski: Matter Embraced: Paintings 1950s and Now, Knoedler & Co., New York, NY Jules Olitski Prints, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI Jules Olitski, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, Fl Jules Olitski Six Decades, The Goldman Warehouse, Miami, FL

2004 Jules Olitski—Half a Life’s Work, Selected Paintings 1972– 2002, Mizel Center for Arts and Culture, Denver, CO

2003 Voyages: Recent Paintings by Jules Olitski, The McIninch Art Gallery, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH

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Jules Olitski—Recent Paintings, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, Australia

Jules Olitski: Paintings from the 70s, Galerie Templon, Paris, France

EXHIBITION HISTORY

With Love and Disregard—New Paintings by Jules Olitski, An 80th Birthday Celebration Ameringer/Yohe Fine Art, New York, NY

Jules Olitski, The Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent School of Art and Design, Nottingham, UK in collaboration with Bernard Jacobson and John Kasmin 2000 Small Mountains; The Artist and the Book, Perrella Gallery, Fulton-Montgomery Community College, Johnstown, NY Jules Olitski: New Work Ameringer/Howard Fine Art, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Landscapes, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI Jules Olitski—Paintings, Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne, Australia Jules Olitski, Paintings by the American Master, Annandale Galleries, Australia Jules Olitski, Galeria Metta, Madrid, Spain 1999–2000 Five Decades of Jules Olitski—A Traveling Retrospective including Prints, Paintings, Drawings and Sculpture, Philharmonic Center for the Arts, Naples, FL. Traveled to: The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Jules Olitski: New Monoprints, Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, Keene State College, Keene, NH Jules Olitski Paintings, 1965–1975, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London, UK Jules Olitski: Views of Winnipesaukee, Mary McGowan Fine Art, Concord, NH Jules Olitski: A Survey, Galeria Metta, Madrid, Spain Jules Olitski Landscapes, Virginia Lynch Gallery, Tiverton, RI

1998 Jules Olitski: New Work, C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, MD

The World in the Evening—Landscapes by Jules Olitski, The Portland Museum, Portland, ME Jules Olitski, New Sculpture, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY 1997 Jules Olitski—New Work, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL Watercolors of Jules Olitski, Dabrinsky Friedland Gallery, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski—The Landscapes, The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Jules Olitski: New Monotypes, Long Fine Art, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Important New Work, Marianne Friedland Gallery, Naples, FL

1996 Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Dorothy Blau, Bay Harbor Island, FL

Jules Olitski: A Ten-Year Retrospective 1993–2003, ThorneSagendorph Art Gallery, Keene State College, Keene, NH

Jules Olitski: New Monotypes, Long Fine Arts, New York, NY

Jules Olitski, Spray Paintings of the 1960’s, Ameringer Yohe Fine Art, New York, 2002

New Landscapes by Jules Olitski, Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, Keene, NH

Jules Olitski: New Acrylics and Watercolors, Gallery V, Columbus, OH

Jules Olitski: Important New Works, Drabinsky-Friedland Galleries, Toronto, Canada

Jules Olitski: A Survey of Paintings 1962–1995, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL

Olitski: New Paintings, Duke University Museum of Art (now the Nasher Museum), Durham, NC

Jules Olitski, M. Knoedler & Co. New York, NY

1995 Jules Olitski, Three New Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

Jules Olitski, New Paintings, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL

1994 Jules Olitski, Recent Paintings, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, NY

Jules Olitski at the New Gallery, The New Gallery, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL

1993 Jules Olitski: A Retrospective, Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, Keene, NH

Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, New York, NY

1992 Jules Olitski: Paintings 1990-1991, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL

Olitski, Musée de Valence, France 1984 Jules Olitski: A Retrospective, Fondation du Château de Jau, Perpignan, France Jules Olitski New Painting, Gallery One, Toronto, On Jules Olitski, Recent Painting, Yares Art, Scottsdale, AZ Jules Olitski: New Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY 1983 Jules Olitski: Bilder-Skulpturen, Galerie Wentzel, Cologne, Germany

Jules Olitski: New Painting, Harcus Gallery, Boston, MA

1982 Jules Olitski, New Paintings on Canvas and Paper, Meredith Long & Co., Houston, TX

1991 Jules Olitski at Brown University, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI

Jules Olitski, Paintings: 1952–1982, Martha White Gallery, Louisville, KY

1990 Jules Olitski: An Important Exhibition of Paintings: 1952–1990, five concurrent exhibitions organized by Salander-O’Reilly Galleries and Canal Arts, New York, NY. Traveled to the: Galerie Montaigne, Paris, France; Francis Graham-Dixon

1981 Jules Olitski: New Paintings on Paper, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

Gallery, London, UK; Galeria Afinsa/Almirante, Madrid, Spain; Salander O’Reilly Galleries, Beverly Hills, CA Jules Olitski: A Retrospective: Three Decades, Buschlen/ Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, Canada Jules Olitski: Selected Paintings, 1963–1990, Gallery One, Toronto, Canada. 1989 Jules Olitski—A Retrospective—Three Decades, Buschlen Mowatt Gallery, Vancouver, Canada The Prints of Jules Olitski, A Catalogue Raisonné, 1954–1989, Associated American Artists, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Spray Paintings of the 1960s, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, Galerie Elca London, Montreal, Canada Jules Olitski—Paintings of the 60s, Riva Yares Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ 1988 Jules Olitski: New Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, Recent Paintings, Gallery One, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski, Stained Paintings, 1961-1964, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitksi, Recent Paintings, Hokin Gallery, Palm Beach, FL Jules Olitski Bilder, Galeri Wentzel, Cologne Germany 1987 Jules Olitski—Milton Avery Distinguished Professors Exhibition, Edith C. Blum Art Institute, Bard College, Avondale-on the Hudson, NY Jules Olitski New Sculpture, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski New Paintings, Gallery One, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski Selected Paintings, Gallery Camino Real, Boca Raton, FL Jules Olitski, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY 1986 Jules Olitski: Sculpture, Yares Art, Scottsdale, AZ Jules Olitski: New Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Selected Paintings 1962–1985: A Retrospective View, Yares Art, Scottsdale, AZ

1985 Jules Olitski, The Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, NH

Jules Olitski, Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton, Canada

Jules Olitski: Paintings from the 60s, Knoedler Gallery, London UK Jules Olitski: Paintings, Janus Gallery, Los Angeles, CA Jules Olitski: Bilder und Skulpturen, Galerie Wentzel, Hamburg, Germany Jules Olitski, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY 1980 Jules Olitski, Gallery One, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris, France Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, Paintings 1968-1977, Theo Waddington Galleries, London, UK Jules Olitski, Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton, Canada 1979 Jules Olitski: Paintings of the 1970s, Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Canada Jules Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY

1978 Kasmin Invites to the Exhibition of New Paintings by Jules Olitski, Knoedler Gallery, London, UK

Jules Olitski, Painting, Harcus-Krakow Gallery, Boston, MA Jules Olitski: New Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada 1977 Jules Olitski Bilder und Grafik, Amerika Haus, Berlin, Germany Jules Olitski, Downstairs Gallery, Edmonton, Canada Jules Olitski: Neue Bilder, Galerie André Emmerich, Zurich, Switzerland Olitski: New Sculpture, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Traveled to the: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC Jules Olitski, M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY

Jules Olitski, Galerie Wentzel, Hamburg, Germany 1974–76 Jules Olitski: Life Drawings, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. Traveled in Canada to the: Winnipeg Art Gallery; MacKenzie Art Gallery, Regina Campus, University of Saskatchewan, Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario; Art Gallery of Windsor, Ontario; Musée d’Art Contemporain, Montreal. Traveled in the US to the: Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Hunter Museum of Art, Chattanooga, TN 1974 Jules Olitski, Galleria dell’Ariete, Milan, Italy Jules Olitski: Neue Bilder, Galerie Andre Emmerich, Zurich, Switzerland Jules Olitski, Knoedler Contemporary, New York, NY 1973 Olitski, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Traveled to the: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Pasadena Museum of Art, Pasadena CA Jules Olitski, Hans Strelow, Dusseldorf, Germany Jules Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland Jules Olitski, Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski: New Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski, Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, NY 1972 Jules Olitski: New Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski, Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York, NY 1971 Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada (February) Jules Olitski/Sculpture, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada (January) Jules Olitski, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI

1970 Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Kasmin, Ltd., London, UK

Jules Olitski, Lawrence Rubin Gallery, New York NY 1969 The Sculpture of Jules Olitski, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Jules Olitski, Lawrence Rubin Gallery, London, UK 1968 Jules Olitski: Recent Painting, Kasmin, Ltd., London, UK Jules Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, PA. Traveled to the: the Hayden Gallery, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA 1967 Jules Olitski: Acrylic on Paper, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Jules Olitski: Paintings, 1963-1967, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC. Traveled to the: Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena CA; San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA

1976 Jules Olitski Recent Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada

1966 Jules Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: Life Drawings, Noah Goldowsky, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada

Jules Olitski, Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, NY 1975 Jules Olitski, Dart Gallery, Chicago, IL Jules Olitski: New Paintings, organized by Kasmin, Ltd. and Waddington Galleries II, London, UK Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: Recent Painting, Kasmin, Ltd., London, UK

Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, Nicholas Wilder Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1965 Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada

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Jules Olitski in Exhibition at Poindexter Gallery, Poindexeter Gallery New York, NY Jules Olitski: New Paintings, Kasmin, Ltd., London, UK Jules Olitski, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY 1964 Jules Olitski: Nine Paintings, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada Olitski, Galerie Lawrence, Paris, France Jules Olitski, Kasmin, Ltd., London, UK

Jules Olitski, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY

Jules Olitski: Paintings and Drawings, Richard Gray Gallery, Chicago, IL 1963 Jules Olitski, Toninelli Arte Moderne, Milan, Italy Olitski, Galeria Topazia Alliata, Rome, Italy

Jules Olitski, Galeria Santacroce, Florence, Italy

Jules Olitski, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY 1962 Jules Olitski, New Gallery, Bennington College, Bennington, VT Jules Olitski, Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY 1961 Jules Olitsky [sic], Poindexter Gallery, New York, NY

2014 Alexander the Great: The Iolas Gallery 1955–1987, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY Things I Can’t Live Without, Collection Vanmoerkerke, Ostend, Belgium 2013 Anthony Caro and Jules Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure, FreedmanArt, New York, NY Caro, Frankenthaler, Louis, Motherwell, Noland, Olitski, Stella, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY 2010–11 Color Fields, Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin, Germany 2008 Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning and American Art 1940–1976, organized by The Jewish Museum, New York, NY, collaboration with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MI Color as Field: American Painting 1950–1975, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO. Traveled to the: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Frist Center for the Visual Arts, Nashville, TN

1960 New Paintings by Jules Olitski, French and Company, New York, NY

2007 Abstract Expressionism & Other Modern Works: The Muriel Kallis Newman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY

1959 Jules Olitski, French and Company, New York, NY

1958 Iolas Gallery, New York, NY

1951 Galerie Huit, Paris, France

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS 2020 The Fullness of Color: 1960s Painting, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY 2019 Caro & Olitski: Les années 1970-1980, Galerie Templon, Paris, France A Cloth Over a Birdcage, Chateau Shatto, Los Angeles, CA 2017 Caro & Olitski: 1965-1968, Painted Sculptures and the Bennington Sprays, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY Color, Form and Light, Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens, GA

2005 The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950– 2005, Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada

2004 Color Field Revisited: Paintings from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Haggerty Museum of Art, Marquette University, Milwaukee, WI 2002 30 x 30: The Brandywine Workshop Collection, Philadelphia Foundation Community Art Gallery, Philadelphia, PA Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris 1950–52, Studio 18 Gallery, New York, NY 2001 Clement Greenberg: A Critic’s Collection, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR. Traveled to the: Lowe Art Gallery, Syracuse, NY; Columbia Museum of Art, Columbia, SC; Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, NY; Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL Objective Color, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT

Color Fields, Bennington Museum of Art, Bennington, VT

1998 The Green Mountain Boys: Caro, Feeley, Noland and Olitski at Bennington in the 1960s, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY. Traveled to: Bennington College, Bennington, VT

Untitled 2011, Paul Petro Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada

1997 Morris Louis—Jules Olitski, Fields of Color, Riva Yares Gallery, Santa Fe, NM

2016 La peinture à l’huile c’est bien difficile…, FRAC LanguedocRoussillon, Montpellier, France

1996 Caro and Olitski: Masters of Abstraction Draw the Figure, New York Studio School, New York, NY

Make Room for Color Field, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

1994 First Annual International Distinguished Artists Symposium and Exhibition, Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, Hartford, CT

1986 An American Renaissance: Painting and Sculpture Since 1940, The Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL Definitive Statements, David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI Préfiguration des Collections D’Art Contemporain de la Fondation Daniel Templon, Sophia-Antipolis, Paris, France 1985 Art Heritage at Hofstra, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY Grand Compositions: Selections from the Collection of David Mirvish, Fort Worth Art Museum, Fort Worth, TX Pre-Postmodern, Richard F. Brush Art Gallery, St. Lawrence University, Canton, NY Selections from the William J. Hokin Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL American Abstract Painting, Margo Leavin Gallery, Los Angeles, CA 1984/86–88 After Matisse, Queens Museum, Flushing, NY. Traveled to the: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Dayton Art Institute, Dayton,OH; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; Bass Museum of Art, Miami Beach, FL; Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; The Chrysler Museum of Art; Norfolk, VA 1984 Arte Contemporáneo Norteamericano: Colección David Mirvish, United States Embassy in Madrid, Spain 1983 Early Works by Contemporary Masters: Caro, Francis, Frankenthaler, Gottlieb, Held, Louis, Noland, Olitski, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY Eighteen Artists at One West Fourth Street, Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, NY New York, New Art: Contemporary Paintings from New York Galleries, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE 1982 American Artists Abroad 1900–1950, Washburn Gallery, New York, NY A Private Vision: Contemporary Art from the Graham Gund Collection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Art in Embassies, United States Embassy in Cairo, Egypt

Miró in America, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

1981 Amerikanische Malerei: 1930-1980, Haus der Kunst, Munich, Germany An American Choice: The Muriel Kallis Steinberg Newman Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Assoziationen zu Blau, Gimpel-Hanover & Andre Emmerich Galerie, Zurich, Switzerland International Florida Artists Exhibition, Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL Depuis la Couleur, 1958/1964, Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains, Bordeaux, France

Bold Abstractions: Selections from the Dallas Museum of Art Collection 1966–1976, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX

1992 European and American Paintings and Sculptures: 1870– 1970, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Australia

The New York School 1969: Henry Geldzahler at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY

Slow Art: Painting in New York Now, PS1, Long Island City, NY

1980–82 In Our Time: From the Collection of the HHK Foundation for Contemporary Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI. Traveled to the: Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH; Columbus Museum of Art, Columbus, Ohio; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA; Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, Iowa; Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, Memphis, TN; University Art Museum, University of Texas, Austin, TX

1990 The Great Decade: The 1960s, A Selection of Paintings and Sculpture, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

1980 L'Amérique aux Indépendants, 91e Exposition, Société des Artistes, Grand Palais, Paris, France

The Patton Collection: A Gift to North Carolina, North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC

1989 Twentieth-Century Painting and Sculpture, Selections for the Tenth Anniversary of the East Building, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Aspects of the ’70s: Painterly Abstraction, Brockton Art Museum, Brockton, MA

Récit d’un temps court, Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCO), Geneva, Switzerland Unsere Amerikaner, Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany 2015 The Art of Collecting, Sweet Briar Museum, Sweet Briar College, Sweet Briar, VA

Pretty Raw: After and Around Helen Frankenthaler, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA White, The Museum of Contemporary Art, Jacksonville, FL

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XL: Large-Scale Paintings from the Permanent Collection, The Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY

France-Amérique: Olivier Debré & Jules Olitski, Galerie Gérald Piltzer, Paris, France 1993 168th Annual Exhibition, National Academy of Design, New York, NY

1987 1967: At the Crossroads, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Contemporary Painting, Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL

The Fifties: Aspects of Painting In New York, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC Five in Florida, Fine Arts Gallery, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL

Selected 20th Century American Self Portraits, Harold Reed Gallery, New York, NY

The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960–1970, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

Selections from the Richard Brown Baker Collection, University of Notre Dame Art Gallery

Seven Works for Major Collections, Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York, NY

Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN

Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

1979–80 A Century of Ceramics in the United States, 1878-1978, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY. Traveled to the: Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC

Monumenta: A Biennial Exhibition of Outdoor Sculpture, Newport, RI

1968 L’Art Vivant, 1965–1968, Foundation Maeght, St. Paul-deVence, France Documenta IV, Kassel, Germany

1979 Images of the Self, Hampshire College Gallery, Amherst, MA

Selected Works from the Collection of Carter Burden, Marlborough Gallery, New York, NY Tenth Anniversary: 1964-1974, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT

Color Abstractions: Selections from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, Boston, MA Monumental Abstractions, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Schwartz Collection, Knoedler Gallery, New York, NY 1978 American Painting of the 1970s, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY Art 9/78: Ninth International Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland Fifteen Sculptors in Steel Around Bennington, 1963-1978, Park-McCullough House Association, North Bennington, VT Selected 20th Century American Nudes, Harold Reed Gallery, New York, NY Three Hundred Years of American Art at the Chrysler Museum, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA 1977 A View of A Decade, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL Drawings of the ’70s, Society for Contemporary Art, Art Institute of Chicago, IL New York: The State of Art, New York State Museum, Albany, NY

Ten Years Ago… An Exhibition of Paintings from 1964, David Mirvish Gallery, Toronto, Canada 1973 American Drawings 1963–1973, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Whitney Biennial Exhibition, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1972 Abstract Painting in the ’70s: A Selection, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA Color Painting, Amherst College, Amherst, MA Contemporary Art: The Collection of Dr. and Mrs. Joseph Gosman, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI Masters of the Sixties, Edmonton Art Gallery, Edmonton, Canada Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1971 Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture: Selections from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz, Milwaukee Art Center, Milwaukee, WI The De Luxe Show (sponsored by The Menil Foundation), De Luxe Theater, Houston, TX

1976 American Abstract Painting, La Bertesca, Genoa, Italy

The Structure of Color, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY

American Color: 1961–1964, Visual Arts Museum, New York, NY

The Vincent Melzac Collection, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

New Works in Clay by Contemporary Painters and Sculptors, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY

1970 35th Annual Exhibition, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

Aspects of Postwar Painting in America, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

American Artists of the Sixties, Centennial Exhibition, Boston University, School of Fine and Applied Arts, Boston, MA

1975–1977 American Art Since 1945: From the Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Traveled to the: Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA; Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio; Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO; Fine Arts Gallery of San Diego, San Diego, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX,; Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NB; Greenville County Museum, Greenville, SC; Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA

Color, UCLA Art Galleries, University of California, Los Angeles, CA

Painting and Sculpture Today: 1976, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN 1975 34th Biennial of Contemporary American Painting, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC El Lenguaje del Color, Museo de Bellas Artes, Caracas, Venezuela 34th Biennial of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC The Virginia and Bagley Wright Collection—American Art Since 1960, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO The Richard Brown Baker Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT 1974 5th International Print Biennale, National Museum of Krakow, Krakow, Poland L’Art au Present, Palais Galliera, Musée de la Mode de la Ville de Paris, France Basel Art Fair, Basel, Switzerland

Color and Field: 1890–1970, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY. Traveled to the: Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

The Gosman Collection, Art Gallery of the University of Pittsburgh, Department of Fine Arts, Pittsburgh, PA Signals in the ’60s, Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, HI Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1967 30th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC A Selection of Paintings and Sculptures from the Collections of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Rowan, University of California, Irvine, CA Focus on Light, The New Jersey State Museum, Trenton, NJ Form, Color, Image, Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI Large-Scale American Paintings, The Jewish Museum, New York, NY Ninth Tokyo Biennale, Metropolitan Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan Torcuato di Tella International Prize Exhibition, Instituto Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires, Argentina 1966 XXXIII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, United States Pavilion, Venice, Italy Frankenthaler, Noland, Olitski, New Brunswick Museum, St. John, Canada.Traveled in Canada to the: Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Regina; The Mendel Art Center, Saskatoon; The Confederation Art Gallery and Museum, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island 1965 Ausstellung Signale, Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 1964 67th Annual American Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL American Drawings, 1964, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY The Atmosphere of 1964, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

Painting and Sculpture Today, Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, IN

New Directions in American Painting, Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Traveled to the: Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute, Utica, NY; Isaac Delgado Museum of Art (now the New Orleans Museum of Art), New Orleans, LA

Selections from the Mr. and Mrs. Robert A. Rowan Collection, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA

Post-Painterly Abstraction, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA

Two Generations of Color Painting, Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA

1963 Aspects of 20th Century Painting, Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, MA

1969 American Art of the ’60s in Private Toronto Collections, York University, Toronto, Canada Concept, Vassar College Art Gallery, Poughkeepsie, NY Contemporary American Painting and Sculpture from the Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene Schwartz, Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY The Development of Modernist Painting: Jackson Pollock to the Present, Steinberg Art Gallery, Washington University, St. Louis, MO New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Painting in New York: 1944–1969, Pasadena Art Museum, Pasadena, CA

Directions: American Painting, San Francisco Museum of Art, San Francisco, CA The Formalists, Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, DC Recent Acquisitions, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski, Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery, University of Saskatchewan, Regina, Canada Whitney Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY 1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA

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Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX

AWARDS

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

2007 Skowhegan Award for Painting, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY

2006 Member of the Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, NY

Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, CT

National Academy Museum, New York, NY

Art Gallery of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia

The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL

National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

1998 Honorary Doctorate of Arts, Keene State College, University of New Hampshire, Keene, NH

David Winton Bell Art Gallery, Brown University, Providence, RI

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea

1997 Honorary Doctorate of Arts, Hartford Art School, University of Hartford, CT

Boca Raton Museum of Art, Boca Raton, FL

Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany

2003 Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters, Southern New Hampshire University, Manchester, NH

1996 Distinguished Artist, Arkansas Celebration of the Arts, Hot Springs, AR 1993 National Academician, National Academy of Design, New York, NY 1991 Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Cambridge, MA 1987 The Milton & Sally Avery Distinguished Professorship, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Beth Tzedek Congregation, Toronto, Ontario, Canada The Luther W. Brady Gallery, George Washington University, Washington, DC Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY The Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI The Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH

1975 Award for Distinction in the Arts, University Union, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX

1967 Corcoran Gold Medal and William A.C. Clark Prize, 30th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary Painters, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Dayton Art Institute, Dayton, OH

1961 Pittsburgh International Exhibition of Contemporary Painting and Sculpture, Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh, PA (awarded 2nd Prize)

Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO The Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit, MI

Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York, Purchase, NY The Weserburg Museum für Moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, NJ Remai Modern, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, WA Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, NE Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA

Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY

Tate Modern, London, UK

Fonds Régional d’Art Contemporain (FRAC) Languedoc-Roussillon, Montpellier, France

Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Israel Thorne-Sagendorph Art Gallery, Keene State College, Keene, NH

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY

Uffizi Portrait Gallery, Florence, Italy

Hara Museum of Art, Shinagawa City, Tokyo, Japan

Vanmoerkerke Collection, Ostend, Belgium

Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA

Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC

Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN

Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH

Washburn Arts Center, Gallaudet University, Washington, DC

Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL

The Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN

The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa The Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School, Hartford, CT The Cyrus and Myrtle Katzen Museum, American University, Washington, DC The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IL Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany Kunstmuseum Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Middlebury College Museum of Art, Middlebury, VT Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI Massachusetts Institute of Technology, List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA Musée d’Art Contemporain de Lyon, Lyon, France Musée d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France Musée National du Château de Jau, Perpignan, France Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria Museum of Art, Fort Lauderdale, FL The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA

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The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT The Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Jules Olitski at his house in Islamorada, Florida, 2002

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 1958 Ashton, Dore. “Art: Work of Draftsmen,” The New York Times, March 11. 1959 Campbell, Lawrence. “Jules Olitski,” ARTnews, May. Tillim, Sidney. “Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, June. 1960 Judd, Donald. “In the Galleries: Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, May. 1962 Judd, Donald. “In the Galleries: Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, April. 1963 Aronson, Harvey. “Portrait of the Artist in Suburbia,” Newsweek, February 25. Finley, Gerald. “Louis, Noland, Olitski,” Artforum, March.

Lippard, Lucy. Introduction to Focus on Light. Exhibition catalogue. Trenton, NJ: New Jersey State Museum. Mellow, James. “New York Letter,” Art International, Christmas. Rose, Barbara. “Abstract Illusionism,” Artforum, November. Tillim, Sidney. “Scale and the Future of Modernism,” Artforum, October. Wilson, William. “Jules Olitski—Another Species of Space Race,” Los Angeles Times, August 27. 1968 Burton, Scott. “Reviews and Previews: Jules Olitski at Poindexter Gallery,” ARTnews, February.

Judd, Donald. “In the Galleries: Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, May– June.

Hudson, Andrew. “On Jules Olitski’s Paintings and Some Changes of View,” Art International, January.

Greenberg, Clement. Introduction to Post-Painterly Abstraction. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles, CA: Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Reprinted in Art International, Summer. Rose, Barbara. “New York Letter,” Art International, April. 1965 Fried, Michael. Introduction to Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, and Stella. Exhibition catalogue. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum. ——— “Jules Olitski’s New Paintings,” Artforum, November. Hudson, Andrew. “Olitski Has Fanciest Spray Gun in the West,” The Washington Post, October 31. Kozloff, Max. “Frankenthaler and Olitski,” The Nation, April. Lippard, Lucy. “New York Letter,” Art International, May. Lynton, Norbert. “London Letter,” Art International, September. 1966 Geldzahler, Henry. “Frankenthaler, Kelly, Lichtenstein, Olitski: A Preview of the American Selections at the 1966 Venice Biennale,” Artforum, June. Greenberg, Clement. “Introduction to Jules Olitski at the Venice Biennale,” in XXXIII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, Venice. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, DC: National Collections of Fine Arts. Kramer, Hilton. “Art: (Jules Olitski),” The New York Times, November 5. Lippard, Lucy. “New York Letter,” Art International, January. Lord, Barry J. Introduction to Frankenthaler, Noland, Olitski. Exhibition catalogue. St. John, Canada: New Brunswick Museum. Mellow, James R. “New York Letter,” Art International, December. Morris, Bernadine. “The Owners of Old Bennington’s Colonial Houses Keep History Up to Date,” The New York Times, August 15.

Solomon, Alan. “The Green Mountain Boys,” Vogue, August.

Wilson, William. “Olitski Expands Edges of Canvas,” Los Angeles Times, July 1. 1967 Andreae, Christopher. “Olitski: Color Beyond Bounds,” Christian Science Monitor, May 17. Champa, Kermit. “Olitski: Nothing but Color,” ARTnews, May. Fried, Michael. “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum, Summer. ——— Introduction to Jules Olitski: Paintings 1963–1967. Exhibition catalogue. Washington, DC: Corcoran Gallery of Art. ——— “Olitski and Shape,” Artforum, January. Gold, Barbara. “Careful Calculation at Corcoran,” Baltimore Sun, February 26.

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Hudson, Andrew. “The 1967 Pittsburgh International,” Art International, December 25.

Greenberg, Clement. Introduction to Three New American Painters: Louis, Noland, Olitski. Exhibition catalogue. Regina, Canada: Norman MacKenzie Art Gallery. Reprinted in Canadian Art, May.

1964 Fried, Michael. “New York Letter,” Art International, May.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Hudson, Andrew. “A Painter Breaks New Ground,” The Washington Post, April 9.

Harrison, Charles. “London Commentaries: Jules Olitski at the Kasmin Gallery,” Studio International, September.

Krauss, Rosalind E. Introduction to Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings. Exhibition catalogue. Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. ——— “On Frontality,” Artforum, May. Kudielka, Robert. “Documenta 4: A Critical Review,” Studio International, September. Millard, Charles W. “On the Non-Relational in Painting,” The Hudson Review, vol. 21, no. 2, Summer. Perreault, John. “Art: Jules Olitski,” The Village Voice, November 21. 1969 Andreae, Christopher. “Olitski: Daring at the Met,” Christian Science Monitor, April 21. Buck, Robert T., Jr. Introduction to The Development of Modernist Painting: Jackson Pollock to the Present. Exhibition catalogue. St. Louis, MO: Steinberg Art Gallery, Washington University. Kramer, Hilton. “Sculpture: The Debut of Jules Olitski,” The New York Times, April 12. Kurtz, Stephen A. “Reviews and Previews: Jules Olitski,” ARTnews, January. Lynton, Norbert. “Jules Olitski,” The Guardian, August 6. Moffett, Kenworth. “The Sculpture of Jules Olitski,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 8, April 1969. Revised and reprinted in Artforum, April. Nemser, Cindy. “In the Galleries: Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, December–January. Robertson, Bryan. “Mixed Sweets,” Spectator, August 30. Shirey, David L. “New York Painting and Sculpture 1940–1970,” Arts Magazine, September–October. Sweeney, James J. Introduction to Signals in the ’60s. Exhibition catalogue. Honolulu, HI: Academy of Arts. 1970 Bailess, Lynn et al. “Jules Olitski,” in Color. Exhibition catalogue. Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Art Council. Colt, Priscilla. Introduction to Color and Field: 1890–1970. Exhibition catalogue. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery. Fenton, Terry. “The David Mirvish Opening Show,” Artscanada, vol. 27, December. Prokopoff, Stephen S. Introduction to Two Generations of Color Painting. Exhibition catalogue. Philadelphia, PA: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania. “Jules Olitski,” in Contemporary Painting and Sculpture. Exhibition catalogue. Wellesley, MA: Jewett Art Center, Wellesley College Museum. Rose, Barbara. “The Spiritual in Art,” Vogue, January.

1971 Baker, Kenneth. “New York: Jules Olitski at Rubin Gallery, New York,” Artforum, May.

Hoesterey, Ingeborg. “New York: Olitski,” Art International, Summer.

Wilkin, Karen and Stephen Long. The Prints of Jules Olitski: A Catalogue Raisonné. New York, NY: Associated American Artists.

Calas, Nicolas and Elena. Icons and Images of the Sixties. New York, NY: E. P. Dutton & Co.

1977 Frackman, Noel. “Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, June.

1990 Buschlen, Don, ed. Jules Olitski: Communing with the Power. Vancouver, Canada: Buschlen-Mowatt Gallery.

Greenwood, Michael. “Jules Olitski’s Sculpture,” Artscanada, vol. 28, February–March. Gruen, John. “While There’s Life...,” New York Magazine, March 29. Prokopoff, Stephen S. “Colour Painting in America,” Art and Artists, vol. 6, July. Siegel, Jeanne. “Reviews and Previews: Jules Olitski,” ARTnews, September. 1972 Bannard, Walter Darby. “Quality, Style, and Olitski,” Artforum, October. Carpenter, Kenneth. “On Order in the Paintings of Jules Olitski,” Art International, December. Elderfield, John. “Painterliness Redefined: Jules Olitski and Recent Abstract Art, Part I,” Art International, December. Kurtz, Bruce. “Abstraction and Actuality,” Arts Magazine, December. Matthias, Rosemary. “In the Galleries: Jules Olitski at Rubin,” Arts Magazine, Summer. Moffett, Kenworth. Introduction to Abstract Paintings in the Seventies: A Selection. Exhibition catalogue, Boston, MA: Museum of Fine Arts. Siegel, Jeanne. “Reviews and Previews: Jules Olitski,” ARTnews, Summer. Wilkin, Karen. Introduction to Masters of the Sixties. Exhibition catalogue. Edmonton, Canada: Edmonton Art Gallery. Zemans, Joyce. “Olitski: The David Mirvish Gallery,” Artscanada, vol. 29, October–November. 1973 Baker, Kenneth. “Artistic Intention vs. Public Interpretation,” Christian Science Monitor, June 13. Carpenter, Kenneth. “Footsteps of a Master: The Jules Olitski Retrospective,” Studio International, September. Elderfield, John. “Painterliness Redefined: Jules Olitski and Recent Abstract Art, Part II,” Art International, April. Genauer, Emily. “Two Retrospectives,” Newsday, September 28. Hess, Thomas. “Olitski Without Flattery,” New York Magazine, October 11. Kramer, Hilton. “Jules Olitski: A Sectarian Scenario,” The New York Times, September 16. Masheck, Joseph. “The Jules Olitski Retrospective,” Artforum, September. Moffett, Kenworth. “Jules Olitski and the State of the Easel Picture,” Arts Magazine, March. Siegel, Jeanne. “Olitski’s Retrospective: Infinite Variety,” ARTnews, Summer. 1974 Carmean, E. A. “Modernist Art: 1960 to 1970,” Studio International, July–August. Geelhaar, Christian. “Jules Olitski,” Kunstforum International, October–November. Millard, Charles W. “Jules Olitski,” The Hudson Review, October. Thomsen, Barbara. “The Strange Case of Jules Olitski,” Art in America, January. 1975 Carmean, E.A., “Olitski, Cubism, and Transparency,” Arts Magazine, November.

Micha, René. “Dzubas, Olitski, Poons,” Art International, March– April. 1978 Ashbery, John. “Cheering Up Our Knowing,” New York Magazine, April 10. Carpenter, Kenneth. “New Works in Clay at the Edmonton Art Gallery,” Artmagazine, November–December.

Denson, G. Roger. “Jules Olitski: The Relevance of the Last Modernist,” Flash Art, January. Geldzahler, Henry, Tim Hilton, and Dominique Fourcade. Jules Olitski. New York, NY: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. Hilton, Tim. “Laying It on Thick,” The Guardian, October 31.

Cathcart, Linda. Introduction to American Painting of the 1970s. Exhibition catalogue. Buffalo, NY: Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

Jiménez, Javier López. “Jules Olitski en España, El Fluir Abstracto De Los Clasicos,” Galería Antiquaria, vol. 8, no. 78.

Frackman, Noel. “Review: Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, June.

Pepich, Bruce W. “Jules Olitski,” Art Gallery International, April.

Marshall, Neil. “The Paintings of Jules Olitski,” in Jules Olitski: New Paintings. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Andre Emmerich Gallery.

Perl, Jed. “The Legend Business,” New Criterion, January, vol. 8, no. 5.

Moffett, Kenworth. “Olitski: New Sculpture,” Art International, January. Raynor, Vivien. “Art: Jules Olitski as Post-Raphaelite,” The New York Times, March 31. Schjeldahl, Peter. “Reviews: Jules Olitski,” Artforum, Summer. Schwartz, Ellen. “Reviews: Olitski,” ARTnews, Summer. 1979 Fenton, Terry. Jules Olitski and the Tradition of Oil Painting. Exhibition Catalogue. Edmonton, Canada: Edmonton Art Gallery. Moffett, Kenworth. Introduction to Color Abstractions: Selections from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Exhibition catalogue. Boston, MA: Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. 1980 Friedman, Hoffman. Introduction to Aspects of the ’70s: Painterly Abstraction. Exhibition catalogue. Brockton: MA: Brockton Art Museum. Mays, John Bentley. “Olitski Abstraction Deserves Closer Look,” Toronto Globe and Mail, September 9. Muehlenbachs, Lelde. “Jules Olitski at the Edmonton Art Gallery,” Arts Magazine, February–March. Perreault, John. Introduction to Selected 20th-Century American Self Portraits. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Harold Reed Gallery. Pleynet, Marcelin. “Jules Olitski: The Challenge of Abstraction,” Connaissance des Arts, US Edition, October. Tatransky, Valentin. “Jules Olitski at Knoedler Gallery,” Arts Magazine, May. 1981 Deschamps, Madeleine. “Depuis la Couleur,” Art Press, January. Fourcade, Dominique. Introduction to Frankenthaler/Louis/ Noland/Olitski: Depuis la Couleur, 1958-1964. Exhibition catalogue. Bordeaux, France: Centre d’arts plastiques contemporains. Moffett, Kenworth. Jules Olitski, New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams. 1982 Clark, T. J. “Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 1, September. Fried, Michael. “How Modernism Works: A Response to T. J. Clark,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 1, September. Johnson, Ellen H., ed. American Artists on Art from 1940–1980, New York, NY: Harper & Row. 1983 Tatransky, Valentin. “The Art of Painting: Jules Olitski, Lawrence Poons, Darryl Hughto,” Arts Magazine, May. 1984 Halasz, Piri. “Jules Olitski: The Golden Mean,” Arts Magazine, May.

1991 Gruen, John. “Artist’s Dialogue: Jules Olitski, Abstract Pursuits in New Hampshire,” Architectural Digest, June. 1993 Rose, Barbara. “Paradise Regained: Jules Olitski’s New Paintings” in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries. 1994 Bannard, Darby. “Jules Olitski at the New Gallery,” in Jules Olitski: New Paintings. Exhibition catalogue. Miami, FL: The New Gallery, University of Miami. Kimmelman, Michael. “Three 60s Art Stars Rise and Shine Again,” The New York Times, May 5. McClintock, Jack. “Is Jules Olitski America’s Greatest Living Artist?” Magazine of South Florida, August 14. Smith, Roberta. “Jules Olitski, True to His School,” The New York Times, October 21. Wilkin, Karen. “Color Painting of the 1960s,” Architectural Digest, August. 1995 Karmel, Pepe. “Jules Olitski,” The New York Times, December 29. 1996 Diehl, Carol. “Jules Olitski: Andre Emmerich and Long Fine Art,” ARTnews, March. Kazanjian, Dodie. “Olitski’s Surprise,” The New Yorker, July 29. 1997 Craven, Robert. “Jules Olitski, The Artist Reinvents Himself,” Art New England, August-September. Dellolio, Peter. “Jules Olitski: New Monotypes,” Arts Magazine, May. Hodecker, Stephen. “A Conversation With Jules Olitski,” New Hampshire Images, Summer. Markham, Pamela. “Jules Olitski Landscapes,” Art New England, October–November. 1998 Collings, Matthew. It Hurts: New York Art from Warhol to Now. London, UK: 21 Publishing. Halasz, Piri. “Green Mountain Boys: Anthony Caro, Paul Feeley, Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, April. Rimanelli, David. “‘The Green Mountain Boys’ at André Emmerich,” Artforum International, April. Schjeldahl, Peter. “Greenberg Again: ‘The Green Mountain Boys,’ ” Village Voice, February 3. 1999 Collings, Matthew. “Jules Olitski Interviewed: What’s it like to be forgotten?” Art Newspaper, International Edition, November. Collings, Matthew. This Is Modern Art. London, UK: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Lilliefors, James. Introduction to Five Decades of Jules Olitski. Exhibition catalogue. Naples, FL: The Philharmonic Center for the Arts.

Ellenzweig, Allen. “Jules Olitski,” Arts Magazine, June.

1986 Gruen, John. “Artist’s Dialogue: Jules Olitski, The Power of Play,” Architectural Digest, October.

Hudson, Andrew. “Jules Olitski: Life Drawings,” Art International, September.

Perl, Jed. “Winter Notebook: Gold,” New Criterion, April.

2000 Kuspit, Donald. “Jules Olitski, Ameringer/Howard Fine Art,” Artforum, December.

1987 Rand, Harry. “Jules Olitski’s Dream Maker,” Arts Magazine, March.

Rosenblum, Robert. “Best of 2000,” Artforum, December.

1976 Burnett, David. “Toronto: Jules Olitski,” Artscanada, October– November.

1989 Enders, Alexandra. “Jules Olitski,” Art & Antiques, March.

Smith, Roberta. “Jules Olitski, Ameringer/Howard Fine Art,” The New York Times, October 13.

Tillim, Sidney. “Ideology and Difference,” Arts Magazine, March.

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Wetherell, W. D. (text) and Jules Olitski (images). Small Mountains. Hanover, NH: Terra Nova.

ARTIST’S WRITINGS AND ARTICLES

2001 Ebony, David. “Jules Olitski at Ameringer/Howard,” Art in America, March.

“Eve In The Garden Of Art,” Arts & Activities, October,1955.

White, Kit. “Jules Olitski Ameringer/Howard,” ARTnews, January. Wilken, Karen and Bruce Guenther. Clement Greenberg, A Critic’s Collection. Exhibition catalogue. Portland, OR: Portland Museum of Art. Wilkin, Karen. “Life After Formalism,” Art in America, November. Van Siclen, Bill. “Jules Olitski at Virginia Lynch Gallery,” ARTnews, October. 2002 Gover, Michael. “International Reviews: Jules Olitski at Bernard Jacobson, London,” ARTnews, June.

“Painting in Color,” (expanded version), Artforum, January, 1967. “On Sculpture,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, vol. 27, no. 8, April, 1969. “First Chapter (A Short Story),” Partisan Review/2, vol. XLV, no. 2,1978 “On Dance,” Partisan Review, vol. 48, no. 3, 1981. “The Courage of Conviction,” in The Courage of Conviction. Edited by Phillip L. Berman. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1985. “My First New York Show,” Partisan Review, vol. 56, no. 1, 1989.

2003 Dannatt, Adrian. “Galerie Huit: American Artists in Paris, 1950–52,” Art in America, May.

“A Letter to Kristina,” in The Courage to Grow Old. Edited byPhillip L. Berman. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1989.

Humblet, Claudine. La Nouvelle Abstraction Américaine 19501970. Milan, Italy: Skira.

“Drawing: Notes from A Student,” Drawing: The International Review of the Drawing Society, vol. 18, no. 1, 1996.

Wilkin, Karen. “At the Galleries,” Partisan Review, vol. 20, no. 1, Winter.

“How My Art Gets Made,” Partisan Review, vol. 68, no. 4, 1996.

2005 Belz, Carl. “Jules Olitski’s Ongoing Present,” in Jules Olitski: Matter Embraced, Paintings 1950’s and Now. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Knoedler & Company.

“Barley Soup and Art—High and Low,” contribution to “What Happened to the Arts?” Partisan Review, vol. 69, no. 4, 2002.

Poster, Lauren, ed. Jules Olitski: The New Hampshire Exhibits, Autumn, 2003. Marlboro, VT: Four Forty.

FILMS FEATURING JULES OLITSKI

Rich, Sarah K. “Jules Olitski: Trouble in Paradise,” in The Shape of Colour: Excursions in Colour Field Art, 1950–2005. Exhibition catalogue. Toronto, Canada: Art Gallery of Ontario.

American Art in the 1960s. Narrated by Barbara Rose, directed by Michael Blackwood. Blackwood Productions Inc., 1972.

2006 Sachs Samet, Jennifer. “Making Art That Works: A Chat with the Artist,” New York Sun, April 17. 2007 Fried, Michael. “Fields of Vision,” Artforum, April. Kleeblatt, Norman. “A Culmination of Contradictions: Jules Olitski’s Last Decade” in Jules Olitski: The Late Paintings, A Celebration. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Knoedler & Company. Ticker, Lisa. “The Kasmin Gallery,” Oxford Art Journal, vol. 30, no. 2. 2008 Wilkin, Karen. “Jules Olitski’s Late Paintings,” The Hudson Review, vol. 61, no. 1. 2010 Jules Olitski: Embracing Circles, 1959–1964. Exhibition catalogue. San Francisco, CA: Hackett/Mill; New York, NY: FreedmanArt. 2011 Farrell, Jennifer. Get There First, Decide Promptly: The Richard Brown Baker Collection of Postwar Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Wilkin, Karen, E.A. Carmean, Alison de Lima Greene. Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski. Exhibition catalogue. Kansas City, MO: Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. 2012 Judkis, Maura. “Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski,” The Washington Post, October 12. Wecker, Menachem. “Painter Jules Olitski Enjoys a Second Life,” Jewish Daily Forward, May 31. 2013 Bennitt, Ami. “Olitski Explained in the 21st Century,” Artscope, November–December. 2014 Genocchio, Benjamin. “In Praise of Unfashionable Art,” Artnet News, March 28. Grimley, Alex. “Things Seen,” in Jules Olitski: Mitt Paintings. Exhibition catalogue. New York, NY: Paul Kasmin Gallery. 2017 Carmean, E. A. and Menachem Wecker. “A Memorial That Knows Its Biblical History,” The Wall Street Journal, September 22. 2019 Allen, Brian T. “Vermont in the Sixties,” National Review Online, October 5. 2020 Carrier, David. “Color Field, Then and Now,” Hyperallergic, March 7. McGlynn, Tom. “Leap of Color,” The Brooklyn Rail, May.

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“Painting in Color,” in XXXIII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, 1966.

Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940–1970. Directed by Emile de Antonio. New Yorker Films, 1973. American Art Since 1960. Narrated by Barbara Rose, directed by Michael Blackwood. Blackwood Productions Inc., 1978. This Is Modern Art. Directed by Matthew Collings, Channel 4 TV series documentary, episode 4 (of 6): "Lovely, Lovely—Beauty in Modern Art," 1998. Jules Olitski: Modern Master. Directed and produced by Kate Purdie and Andy Reichsman. Ames Hill Productions in cooperation with the Olitski Family Estate, 2011.

Jules Olitski fishing off of Sister Island, Lake Wentworth, New Hampshire, July 1972.

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C ATA L O G U E O F T H E E X H I B I T I O N

PAINTINGS

In My Old Tin Lizzie 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 80 ¼ x 84 ¼ in. (203.8 x 214 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski

Yaksi Darling 1961 Acrylic on canvas 47 x 35 in. (119.4 x 88.9 cm) Private Collection

Ishtar Bra Box * 1961 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 120 in. (203.2 x 304.8 cm) Private Collection

Yellow Juice * 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 92 x 120 in. (233.7 x 304.8 cm) Private Collection

Fanny D 1960 Magna acrylic on canvas 89 x 89 ½ in. (226.1 x 227.3 cm)

Mascha * 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 82 x 78 ¼ in. (208.3 x 198.8 cm) Collection of Fran and Lawrence Bloomberg

Cadmium Orange of Doctor Frankenstein * 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 90 3⁄8 x 80 in. (229.6 x 203.2 cm) Collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC

Fanny Dimes * 1960 Magna acrylic on canvas 80 x 68 in. (203.2 x 172.7 cm) Collection of David and Marla Susser

Passion Machine 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 63 ¼ x 79 in. (160.7 x 200.7 cm) Private Collection

Lucy’s Fancy 1960 Acrylic on canvas 79 x 125 in. (200.7 x 317.5 cm)

Phantom Touch 1961 Acrylic on canvas 19 x 17 in. (48.3 x 43.2 cm)

Potsy * 1960 Magna acrylic on canvas 80 x 68 ¼ in. (203.2 x 173.4 cm) Private Collection

Purple Mekle Lippis * 1961 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 66 ¼ in. (203.2 x 168.3 cm) Collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

Necessary Light 1959 Acrylic on canvas 80 ½ x 68 ½ in. (204.5 x 174 cm) Private Collection Basium Blush 1960 Magna acrylic on canvas 79 x 109 in. (200.7 x 276.9 cm)

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After Five 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 92 ½ x 93 ½ in. (235 x 237.5 cm) Private Collection

Pursuit of Daphne 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 51 x 40 in. (129.5 x 101.6 cm)

Fair Charlotte 1961 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 122 in (203.2 x 309.9 cm) Private Collection

Shakeup Sally 1961 Acrylic on canvas 44 x 42 in. (111.8 x 106.7 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski

Flying Doll * 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 73 x 53 in. (185.4 x 134.6 cm) Collection of Robert and Ana Greene

The Julius Dmikhovsky Image * 1961 Magna acrylic on canvas 80 x 128 ¾ in. (203.2 x 327 cm) Private Collection

Cleopatra Flesh * 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 104 x 89 7⁄8 inches (264.2 x 228.3 cm) Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York; Gift of G. David Thompson East Seventieth Street Rapture 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 46 x 36 ½ in. (116.8 x 92.7 cm) Golubchik – Purple * 1962 Magna acrylic and varnish on canvas 90 ¼ x 132 ¼ in. (229.2 x 335.9 cm) Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto Isis Dearie * 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 79 x 102 ½ in. (200.7 x 260.4 cm) Private Collection Mushroom Perfume 1962 Magna acrylic and varnish on canvas 80 x 66 in. (203.2 x 167.6 cm) Pink Ishtar Belly 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 79 ¼ x 64 ¼ in. (201.3 x 163.2 cm) Private Collection

Prince Patutszky Pleasures * 1962 Magna acrylic on canvas 89 ¾ x 88 in. (228 x 223.5 cm) Collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri Thursday 1962 Acrylic on canvas 90 x 78 in. (228.6 x 198.1 cm) Private Collection Voyage * 1962 Acrylic on canvas 82 x 94 ½ in. (208.3 x 240 cm) Collection of the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University, California Age of Seventy Zohars * 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 46 x 56 ¼ in. (116.8 x 142.9 cm) Private Collection Beautiful Bald Woman * 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 97 x 68 in. (246.4 x 172.7 cm) Collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Gift of Frank Stella Casanova Catch 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 28 x 30 in. (71.1 x 76.2 cm) Circle Stretch 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 90 x 79 ½ in. (228.6 x 201.9 cm) Private Collection Dream Lady 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 24 ½ x 18 in. (62.2 x 45.7 cm) Private Collection Fatal Plunge Lady 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 100 x 72 in. (254 x 182.9 cm) Private Collection

First Pull * 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 103 x 89 ½ in. (261.6 x 227.3 cm) Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut Free Spirit 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 90 x 83 in. (228.6 x 210.8 cm) Private Collection Love’s Dream – 1 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 38 x 28 in. (96.5 x 71.1 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski Patutsky Jazz 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 84 ½ x 40 in. (214.6 x 101.6 cm) Private Collection Patutsky Passion 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 88 x 71 ½ in. (223.5 x 181.6 cm) Private Collection Queen of Sheba Breast * 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 82 ¼ x 78 ¼ in. (208.9 x 198.8 cm) Collection of Yale University Art Gallery, Richard Brown Baker, B.A. 1935, Collection, New Haven, Connecticut Virgin Rider * 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 11 ½ x 25 in. (29.2 x 63.5 cm) Private Collection Wet Heat Company 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 87 x 80 in. (221 x 203.2 cm) Private Collection Yaksi Juice 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 66 x 80 in. (167.6 x 203.2 cm) Private Collection

Yankee Crooner 1963 Magna acrylic on canvas 47 ¼ x 35 ¼ in. (120 x 89.5 cm) Big Diagonal 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 93 ½ x 111 ½ in. (237.5 x 283.2 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski Flopper 1964 Acrylic on canvas 19 ½ x 33 in. (49.5 x 83.8 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski Joshua Jump * 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 45 x 42 in. (114.3 x 106.7 cm) Private Collection Julius Green * 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 67 x 91 in. (170.2 x 231.1 cm) Private Collection Miss Yellow Gorgophone * 1964 Acrylic on canvas 80 x 66 in. (203.2 x 167.6 cm) Collection of Ms. Annette Broatch Monkey Woman 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 66 x 72 in. (167.6 x 182.9 cm) Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto Nitti Gritti * 1964 Magna acrylic and pastel on canvas 93 ½ x 84 ½ in. (237.5 x 214.6 cm) Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto Pink Doozhie 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 84 x 80 in. (213.4 x 203.2 cm) Private Collection Purple Casanova * 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 72 x 66 1⁄3 in. (182.9 x 168.4 cm) Shuman Collection

Tea Party 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 93 x 80 in. (236.2 x 203.2 cm) Collection of Audrey and David Mirvish, Toronto

Janus – 19 1963 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Private Collection

Z* 1964 Magna acrylic on canvas 96 x 72 in. (236.2 x 188 cm) Ray and Kay Harvey Collection

Bathsheba Dream – 2 1964 Oil pastel on paper 11 7⁄8 x 8 ¾ in. (30.2 x 22.2 cm) Private Collection

Colour Flow 1965 Acrylic and pastel on canvas 90 x 85 in. (228.6 x 215.9 cm)

Daphne Series – 1 1964 Oil pastel on paper 9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski

Judith Juice 1965 Acrylic on canvas 99 ¾ x 69 ½ in. (253.4 x 176.5 cm) Solomon’s Song 1966 Magna acrylic on canvas 95 x 68 in. (241.3 x 172.7 cm)

DRAWINGS Janus – 1 1963 Oil pastel and wax crayon on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski Janus – 9 1963 Oil pastel on paper 11 7⁄8 x 8 7⁄8 in. (30.2 x 22.5 cm) Janus – 12 1963 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Private Collection Janus – 17 1963 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski

Daphne Series – 2 1964 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Private Collection Daphne Series – 4 1964 Oil pastel on paper 9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm) Daphne Series – 6 1964 Oil pastel on paper 9 x 12 in. (22.9 x 30.5 cm) Private Collection Daphne Series – 8 1964 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Janus – 13 1964 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski Janus – 16 1964 Oil pastel on paper 12 x 9 in. (30.5 x 22.9 cm) Estate of Jules Olitski

*Works that are not included in the exhibition

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ABOUT JULES I wrote a letter to Jules Olitski, as I wanted very much to show his work. He responded by inviting me to his island in New Hampshire. That summer, I went to New Hampshire, and Olitski sent someone to pick me up in a small boat. When I arrived at Bear Island, there was Olitski, a large man with soft eyes, holding a big glass of Scotch, at ten in the morning. I liked him immediately; he was a very warm and attractive man. He was just about to go to sleep during the day. His wife, Kristina, a young and beautiful Greek lady, welcomed us, and we went to the house. We talked for a while and had a beautiful lunch. Olitski didn’t go to sleep that day. Instead, we went to his studio. How interesting it was to me that most of the canvases were lying on the floor, as that’s where he painted them.They were thickly textured, and he covered the whole canvas in this way. This was the beginning of a new style for him, as the earlier works were much more minimal and painted very thinly. We met again for dinner, and then after dinner everybody went to sleep except Olitski and me. We stayed by the dinner table and talked—all night. We didn’t talk about art. We talked about Jewish literature, with which he was so familiar, as was I. I think this was the magic. Talk to an artist about any subject other than art, and he will love you. And that’s how my relationship with Jules Olitski began. We did a few shows in Scottsdale of his work. Olitski came with Kristina, and we made a great exhibition. Jules died in 2007. I love you, Jules Olitski.

—Riva Yares

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Published on the occasion of the exhibition Jules Olitski – Color to the Core: Painting 1960–1964 Yares Art, New York November 7, 2020–January 30, 2021

Catalogue © Yares Art, New York 2020 Olitski at the Core: An Introduction © David Ebony The Sticky Spring Leaves, the Blue Sky © Alexander Nemerov “A Curious Painting is Taking Shape”: Jules Olitski’s Ludic Surfaces, 1959–1964 © Patricia L Lewy Jules Oltiski Chronology © Alex Grimley Editorial and Design Production: SNAP Editions, New York Editorial: Sarah S. King, Annikka Olsen, Diane Armitage, Stephanie Cash, Nathan Jones Design: Tim Laun and Natalie Wedeking Printing: Brilliant Graphics, Exton, PA Principle Photography: Jason Mandella Photography: Michael Cullen: p.79; Clint Jenkins: p.11; Chris Jorian: p.37; Joe Kramm Photography: p.107; Chris Loomis: p.90; James Hart: pp.44, 56, 65, 80, 81, 82 (left & right), 85; Rachel Portesi Photography: p.83 (left & right); Michael Tropea: pp.62, 75; Michael Visser: pp.34, 39, 42, 53, 86 Edition of 1,000 ISBN: 978-1-7324480-3-2 All works by Jules Olitski © 2020 Estate of Jules Olitski licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York All documentary materials, including photographs on p.92, fig 1; p.122, courtesy of the Jules Olitski Estate Archives. © Ugo Mulas Estate: p.2, 51 Paul Klee © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: p.7, fig.1 Joan Miró © 2020 Successió Joan Miró/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris 2020: p.7, fig.2 Ossip Zadkine © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris: p.8, fig.3 Henri Matisse © 2020 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; photo © Archives H. Matisse, all rights reserved: p.8, fig.5; p.22, fig.6; p.25, fig.12 © Arnold Newman/Getty Images: p.18 Jean Dubuffett © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris: p.21, fig.2 Vasily Kandinsky © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York: p.24, fig.11 © 2020 New York Times via Redux Pictures: p.95, fig.13 © Cora Ward: p.96, fig.16 © Reg Lancaster/Getty Images: p.97, fig.17 © Dawn Andrews: p.97, figs.20, 21; p.98, fig.26; p.117 © Sara Lukinson: p.98, fig.22 © Jimm Roberts: p.101, fig.34 Kristina Olitski © Jules Olitski Estate: p.102, fig.37; p.113 © Zann and Pinkerton Photography: p.103, fig. 43

Quotes: p.28: Recorded at the First Annual International Distinguished Artists Symposium and Exhibition at the Hartford Art School, Hartford, CT, April 28, 1994; moderated by art critic Karen Wilkin. Excerpted from Jules Oltiski: Modern Master, a film by Ames Hill Productions in cooperation with The Olitski Family Estate © Directed and produced by Kate Purdie and Andy Reichsman, 2011. p.43: Jules Olitski, “Speech delivered at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, March 27, 1975,” in Kenworth Moffett, Jules Olitski (New York, NY: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), 218–220; edited for clarity. p.52: Jules Olitski, “Painting in Color,” in XXXIII International Biennial Exhibition of Art, Venice, 1966. Individual images appearing in this publication may be protected by copyright in the United States of America, or elsewhere, and may not be reproduced in any form without the permission of the rights holder. In reproducing the images contained in this publication, the publisher obtained the permission of the rights holders wherever possible. Should the publishers have been unable to locate the rights holder, notwithstanding good faith efforts, it requests that any contact information concerning such rights be forwarded so that they may be contacted for future editions. Cover image for softcover edition: Fanny D, 1960. Magna acrylic on canvas, 89 x 89 ½ in. (226.1 x 227.3 cm) Dust jacket image for hardcover edition: Lucy’s Fancy,1960. Acrylic on canvas, 79 x 125 in. (200.7 x 317.5 cm)

YARESART.COM

Jules Olitski

Articles inside

Jules Olitski Chronology Alex Grimley

A Curious Painting is Taking Shape”: Jules Olitski’s Ludic Surfaces, 1959–1964

Catalogue of the Exhibition

Olitski at the Core: An Introduction

The Sticky Spring Leaves, the Blue Sky

About Jules