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.
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