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

Catalogue of the Exhibition

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.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.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.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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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

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

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.

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

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. 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.

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.

34. Ibid.

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

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

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.

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

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

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 Olitski, unpublished essay (ellipses original), 1965.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

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.

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.

46. Fried, “New York Letter,” 40.

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

48. Fried, “New York Letter,” 40.

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

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

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