The Sticky Spring Leaves, the Blue Sky

“A CURIOUS PAINTING IS TAKING SHAPE”: JULES OLITSKI’S LUDIC SURFACES, 1959–1964

BY PATRICIA L LEWY

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:

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

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.

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.