Jules took classes at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design on Manhattan's East Side.
Gallery of Jules Olitski
In 1939 he won a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York.
Gallery of Jules Olitski
He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1940 to 1942ю
Gallery of Jules Olitski
Olitski moved back to New York in 1951 and began studying at New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and a Master of Arts in Art Education in 1954.
Olitski moved back to New York in 1951 and began studying at New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and a Master of Arts in Art Education in 1954.
Jules Olitski was a Ukrainian – American abstract painter, printmaker, and sculptor who was creating humorous, and insightful artworks. He was instrumental in the development of the Color Field school. Like his contemporaries Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, Olitski stained the surface of his canvases in a technique that rejected the gestural brushwork of the then-popular Abstract Expressionist artists.
Background
Jules Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Snovsk, Russia (now Ukraine), on March 27, 1922, into the family of Jevel and Anna (Zarnitsky) Demikovsky. His Bolshevik father was executed by the White Russian army a few months before his birth. In 1923 his mother and grandmother brought him to the United States, where the family started a new life in Brooklyn, New York. His mother remarried in 1926, and he took the surname of his mother's new husband, Hyman Olitsky. He changed the spelling of his name later in life after it was misprinted in a clerical error.
Education
Olitski showed an early talent for drawing and began taking art classes during his teens. In 1939 he won a scholarship to Pratt Institute in New York. He studied at the National Academy of Design from 1940 to 1942 and also took classes at the Beaux Arts Institute of Design on Manhattan's East Side. After becoming a United States citizen in 1942, he was conscripted into military service for three years during World War II. Although he never served overseas, he lived in Paris from 1949 until 1951 and was able to attend the Ossip Zadkine School and the Academie de la Grande Chaumiere through the educational benefits of the G.I. Bill. Olitski moved back to New York in 1951 and began studying at New York University, where he earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1952 and a Master of Arts in Art Education in 1954.
Jules's first one-man exhibition was held at the Galerie Huit in 1951. In 1956 he took a position as the head of the Fine Art Division at C.W. Post College of Long Island University, where he taught for seven years. During this time, Olitski began to receive recognition as an artist in New York. He exhibited at Iolas Gallery in 1958, and in 1959 he held his first one-man show in the city at the gallery French & Co., where the renowned critic Clement Greenberg was a consultant. Greenberg became Olitski's steadfast champion and guided his career to its zenith.
At the time he was discovered by Greenberg, Olitski was creating monochromatic canvases in an Abstract Expressionist idiom influenced by older painters like Hans Hofmann. However, he soon began experimenting with a variety of media and new techniques. By the late 1950s, the gestural abstraction of the New York School was being challenged by a group of younger artists who reacted against the heavy impasto and distinctive brushstrokes of Action Painting. They sought to remove the illusion of depth and any evidence of the painter's hand in a style dubbed "post-painterly abstraction" by Greenberg.
Olitski, along with his colleagues Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Morris Louis, was one of the pioneers of post-painterly abstraction. These artists shared certain techniques, such as a method of staining the canvas by pouring quick-drying acrylic pigment directly onto it. Olitski's experiments with stain painting can be seen in works like "Cleopatra Flesh" (1962), which features the bright colors and large, simplified shapes that mark his work of the early 1960s. During the mid-1960s, however, Olitski abruptly changed his method. In 1964, in works like "Tin Lizzie Green" (1964), he began using rollers to press paint into the canvas in wispy, superimposed sheets of uninterrupted color.
Olitski's most important breakthrough came in the spring of 1965, when he began using industrial spray guns to apply diaphanous layers of paint to unprimed, unstretched canvas. This process was groundbreaking. It removed all vestiges of drawing and of the artist's hand. It was considered by some critics, including Michael Fried in his introduction to Olitski's 1967 show at the Corcoran Gallery, to be the apotheosis of the Color Field movement because it made possible the interpenetration of different colors, the intensity of each of which appears to fluctuate continuously. Fried went on to say that this interpenetration and fluctuation created a new visual experience in modern art. This elimination of depth and new understanding of the picture surface illustrate Olitski's own goal for his paintings to resemble "nothing but some colors sprayed into the air and staying there." These works of the mid-1960s, such as "Patutsky in Paradise" (1966) were praised by critics and are still considered the most important of Olitski's career.
By this time Olitski had become a major player in the New York avant-garde and was chosen to represent the United States, along with Helen Frankenthaler, Ellsworth Kelly, and Roy Lichtenstein, at the 33rd Venice Biennale in 1966. In the introduction to the catalogue, Greenberg heaped praise upon Olitski, calling his paintings "masterpieces." Olitski's star continued to rise throughout the late 1960s. He was the subject of a major exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery in 1967, and his sculpture was showcased in a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969. In New York, his circle of close friends included the painters Kenneth Noland and Larry Poons and the sculptors Anthony Caro and David Smith. He also spent time in Vermont, teaching art at Bennington College from 1963 to 1967.
However, in the early 1970s Olitski changed his modus operandi yet again and began applying paint in a thick impasto that harkened back to the gestural abstraction of his predecessors. Although he was the subject of a major retrospective organized by Boston's Museum of Fine Arts in 1973, the tide of critical opinion began to turn against him. Post-painterly abstraction had been challenged by Pop art, Minimalism, and Conceptual art; however, Olitski continued to paint as he liked, regardless of these newer movements. His persistence drew harsh reviews from critics like Hilton Kramer.
Equally negative critical response to his forays into sculpture relegated Olitski to the sidelines of the American avant-garde. The decline in Olitski's stature among other critics and his younger peers was most likely only hastened by Greenberg's continued assertion, which he maintained until 1990, that Olitski was the best living American painter. His dedication to a fixed set of artistic ideals had apparently turned out to be a dead end for his career.
During the two decades following his 1973 retrospective, Olitski's work was infrequently included in major exhibitions, and his sales saw a severe downturn. However, undeterred by this change in public and critical taste, he continued to experiment. His brushwork became increasingly dynamic and his paint application even heavier as he moved from a grisaille palette to brighter tones with iridescent finishes. His embrace of depth and movement during this period has caused his work of the 1980s and early 1990s to be described as "baroque" by later art historians and critics.
Olitski's paintings of the later 1990s were inspired by landscapes near his summer home in New Hampshire and his winter house in the Florida Keys, This return to the depiction of the natural world was a major departure from a career that had avoided any recognizable imagery in favor of pure abstraction. He also became interested in printmaking and in watercolor painting, and he devoted a great deal of his time to these media. As he had done throughout his career, he preferred to paint throughout the night and sleep late into the day.
In the last decade of his life, Olitski began a final series of vivid, forceful abstractions titled "With Love and Disregard" (2002). When this series was exhibited in New York in 2002, it received many positive reviews. Olitski painted until his death from cancer in 2007 at age 84. He was survived by his third wife, Joan (known as Kristina) Olitski, as well as two daughters from his previous marriages and a stepdaughter.
Achievements
Olitski's art continues to be exhibited in galleries worldwide, and he is represented in major museum collections including those of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the National Gallery of Art, and the Tate. In 2011 Olitski was the subject of a large-scale retrospective exhibition organized by the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, Missouri, which traveled across the United States and was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue. This recent reexamination of Olitski's career has confirmed his importance as a mid-century abstractionist and his influence on a younger generation of abstract painters.
Nude Seated with Arms Joined and Resting on a Support
La Boca Love Song
Pink-Grey II
Angel Prayer
No Objects-One
Demon Queen 3
Twice Disarmed
Cleopatra Two
Lakshmi Steam
Blue Sky and Winter Dusk
Fatal Plunge
Prince Patutsky's Command
Greek Princess - 8
The Exaltation
Without Angst
Prince Patutszky's Pleasures
Beauty of Women Lures Angels
Flow Forth, Yellow
August Fourth
Fanny Dimes
Hallyway Call
Pouncer: Pink and Yellow
Sunset On Matecumbe Bay
Purple Golubchik
Untitled
Shining Passage
Divine Hostage
Brontes The Cyclops
January Dream, Blue
Cynthera 7
By Love Unlocked: Beauty
Revelation: Pink and Yellow
Julius and His Friends
Untitled
Ogygia
Friend of the Duchess
Messiah Hope 2
Patutsky in Paradise
At Daybreak
Luminous Dawn
The Prince Patutszky - Red
One Time
Mostly Mozart
Untitled #9
With Love and Disregard: Enchanted at Dawn
Pale Blue II
Erotas
Turquoise in the Embrace
Patutsky Embraced: Black and White
Crimson-Orange II
9th Yellow
Kristina Type - Seven
Beauty of the Women of Jerusalem
Mushroom Joy
Around Us - Eight
Eos the Titan
Monkey Woman
Dream Dimensions
Pushkin Light III
King Kong
Iron Cone 02-3
Optimum
Sculpture No. 9
From the Dark
Saturnian
Princess Yellow
Moses Path
Loosha-One
Juno Four
Shoot
Flame Out
April Dream
Untitled
Without Sin (I)
After the Fire
Prince Patutsky
Beauty of Ariel
Temptation: Red and Yellow
Tin Lizzie Green
Alexandra: Orange
Summer Nights Three
Instant Loveland
Lucy's Fancy
Draky
Orange Flash
Fertile Crescent Flesh-Six
Magic Journey
See Didache
Magenta-Orange I
Bathsheba Reverie: Yellow
Views
Olitski was interested in conveying the evocative power of pure color. In his paintings of the 1960s and 1970s, he rejected any suggestion of imagery or narrative, taking abstraction to its outer limits. The misty fields of paint in Olitski's signature works are remarkable for their subtle tonal gradations and their luminosity. Even in his later work, when he used heavy brushwork and a denser application of pigment, Olitski masterfully explored chromatic relationships and the interaction between color and light.
Quotations:
"What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of colour that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape."
"When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color (even when stained into raw canvas) appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface."
"Decisions are being made a mile a minute while you're making the work, and it has to come out of experience and vision."
"I work day and night without sleep. The paintings keep me fired up."
"I think of painting as possessed by a structure.. but a structure born of the flow of color feeling."
"In the bedroom darkness I may visualise a way of making a painting. I can see it - if I do this and this and that and this, my God! Why haven't I seen this until now? I can hardly wait to get to the studio and make the vision real."
"Expect nothing. Do your work. Celebrate!"
Connections
Jules Olitski is survived by his wife of 32 years, Kristina Olitski, his daughters Lauren Olitski Poster and Eve Olitski, his step-daughter Natasha Cebek, and his grandchildren Ariel Poster, Harry Poster, Chloe Cebek, Daphne Cebek, and Ian Cebek.
