TitleSalome Rock
Artist
Jules Olitski
(1922 - 2007)
Date1990
MediumAcrylic on canvas
DimensionsUnframed: 48 × 24 in.
Framed: 49 1/8 × 25 1/4 × 2 1/8 in.
SignedSigned and dated on reverse.
SubmissionANA diploma presentation, February 3, 1993
Credit LineNational Academy of Design, New York, NY
Object number1993.8
Label TextA leading figure in the Color Field movement in the 1960s, Olitski was born in the Ukraine and came with his family to America as a young child. From 1940 to 1942 he studied at the National Academy of Design School, where he followed a traditional curriculum of drawing from casts of antique sculpture and from live models. Following World War II, the artist continued his education in Paris first at the Ossip Zadkine School and from 1949 to 1951 at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. It was there that Olitski, in a search for something more satisfying than his earlier representational work, began to paint abstractly. After his return to America and receiving a BA and MA from New York University, Olitski took a teaching position at Long Island University, C. W. Post campus, and by the end of the decade was painting thickly impastoed works that have been linked to Art informel-a European counterpart to Abstract Expressionism-most notably the work of Jean Fautrier. Soon abandoning the agitated gestural work of his first abstract style, Olitski began to find his mature artistic voice by the early 1960s and produced paintings that were instead created with broad areas of color-what would become known as Color Field painting. It was a time when many artists felt that Abstract Expressionism had run its course, and in addition to eliminating the mark of the painter's hand, many sought new methods and modes of working. To create his paintings, Olitski began to utilize a pneumatic spray gun to apply pigment to the canvas, allowing for subtle variations of intensity and chromatic blending. Championed by formalist critics including Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, Olitski's work was included in numerous influential exhibitions of the decade, including Greenberg's Post Painterly Abstraction in 1964 and the Venice Biennale of 1966, among others. From 1963 to 1967 he taught at Bennington College where he became friendly with colleagues Anthony Caro and Kenneth Noland.
The abandonment of Color Field and a return to a gestural application of paint in Olitski's work of the 1970s was a harbinger of things to come. This trend continued through the succeeding decades and may even be seen in Olitski's vividly chromatic paintings of his last years. "Salome Rock" comes from a series of works during the late 1980s and 1990s in which the artist was using additives in acrylic paint to exploit not only the three-dimensional qualities of gesture, but also notions of hue and pigment that in many ways recall his Color Field paintings of the 1960s. Olitski synthesized techniques by applying thick acrylic paint with a glove, working it back and forth as if washing a window, and afterwards spraying pigment on top. The effect of additives to the pigment can range from near monochromatic blacks and grays to a spectrum of seemingly infinite prismatic colors depending on the angle of illumination.
MNP
