Olitski at the Core: An Introduction

THE STICKY SPRING LEAVES, THE BLUE SKY

BY ALEXANDER NEMEROV

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.