JULES OLITSKI MITT PAINTINGS
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FOREWORD BY LAUREN OLITSKI POSTER
an industrial spray gun brought to life the dream of “a spray of color that would hang like a cloud”3 and descend gently to the canvas on the floor. Later squeegees and brooms were pressed into service to manipulate the thickened surfaces that the newly developed acrylic gels produced. He became fascinated with the effects of interference and iridescent pigments applied to the reflective surface of Plexiglas, or applied to garishly colored, mirrored surfaces. All materials, tools — available to serve his enormous curiosity. In 1988 the thick gels and the interference and iridescent pigments came together for Olitski in a way that hadn’t happened before. “Let the structure appear as you make it… the vision that you have will take shape, if not in that particular painting, then in the next one, and the next. I thought, “Oh, this glove… a glove like that, with all that fur, would create a certain surface, so I can’t wait to see what will happen if I do it. That glove which Kristina found4 became one of many gloves… a family of gloves…. I would have (an assistant) mix up this color in two-gallon, three-gallon pails, and make a tint. “I want this color, that color.” I’d have all this set up, and the glove, and the canvas, and I could just put that big, furry mitt in the paint, take a big gob-full of it and put it, plop, on the canvas. Then another, and another, and another, and begin moving them around.5 Karen Wilkin wrote, “— we easily recall that Olitski the radical modernist revered the Old Masters. He often said that as a young man, he wanted to paint like Rembrandt and he adored El Greco”.6 In a studio note from 1993 Olitski wrote, “There are places where you feel at home. Later, thinking about it you think you’ve lived there, lived there in another life… Toledo in 19917 became something like this, (but) here it was the art. The El Grecos, not the streets that I breathed as my own… I am not, never was, and can never hope to be El Greco, but on the second floor of the Museo de Santa Cruz, walking down the broad corridor of the main gallery toward a large vertical painting of the Virgin called The Ascension, I was possessed. I did not
The work selected for this exhibit, Jules Olitski, Mitt Paintings range from 1988 to 1992. They have come to be known as the “mitt paintings” because of the painter’s mitt — a high density polyester mitten with texture similar to a paint roller, used primarily for painting fences — that was used in their making. These paintings represent both a change from the work Olitski was doing previously, as well as a continuing — a building upon — all that came before it. “Why has the impulse to work with pigment as physical matter that I used in my paintings of the late Fifties resurfaced after all these years? My hunch is that the urge has been there, in one way or another, all the time, and is likely to continue to be. I am impelled to explore — maybe a blunter word like exploit is more apt — the seemingly endless possibilities offered by paint and canvas. If I said I knew or know exactly why I stained this, soaked that, sprayed or thickened paint and so on, I wouldn’t be telling the truth. Things take their course. But the essential visual impulse, which may twist and turn as it acts and reacts is always the same, no matter how different the work may look at the moment”.1 As the artist’s daughter it feels somewhat awkward for me to refer to my father in the third person. I strive to give some background, some understanding from my perspective, of the mitt paintings and how they came in to being. As much as I can I will use his own words, as who better to tell it? “It was a glove of sorts, …a painter’s glove that’s fuzzy. A furry mitt, … used on stucco walls, or some disgusting thing... So things happen. Some one will bring me something and say, “Can you use this?” and it will remain in the studio, sometimes for years, then, suddenly, it will suit my purpose for something I’m dreaming of, visualizing, and how to do it, how to make it? The artist, I believe, has a visual vision, then he finds a way to realize it.”2 In the sixties a large sponge, or rollers dipped in Magna acrylic allowed for saturated color to be stained directly on to raw canvas, then
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PARADISE REGAINED: JULES OLITSKI’S NEW PAINTINGS BARBARA ROSE This text was originally reproduced in Jules Olitski: Recent Paintings (New York: Salander-O’Reilly Galleries, Inc., 1993). It is reproduced here with permission of the author. Là tout n’est qu’ordre et beauté luxe, calme et volupté —Charles Baudelaire, Invitation au Voyage Thirty years ago I wrote a rave review of Jules Olitski’s show at the Poindexter Gallery. I stuck my neck out and called it the best exhibition of the year at a moment that “correct” thinking required hailing Pop art as the apogee of the avant-garde. I never regretted my praise for the relatively unknown abstract painter. Back in 1963, I was struck by the freshness and generosity of Olitski’s vision, the originality of his palette, and his courageous willingness to risk a whole picture on controlling the accidental and the spontaneously improvised. I still am. Recently I walked into a room of Olitski’s heavily impastoed, darkly glowing new paintings and felt the same sense of excitement and discovery that drew me to his work in the first place. Their intensity, exuberance and, above all, their powerful physicality set them apart from the anemic and contrived goods competing for attention in galleries and museums today. Still working with paint and canvas, an older, maybe even a wiser, Olitski had again managed to create startling and dramatic visual efforts and to evoke sensations and associations that are emotionally stirring and evocative without being commonplace or illustrational. Of course the great crashing waves of pigment colliding and cresting in delicate foamy ripples could suggest the ocean and its tides and tempests. Or for that matter, the same swirling, expanding and contracting gobs of paint might evoke the sky, either in a darkening purplish green twilight or a delicate orange pink sunrise. The double referent to sea and/or sky brings to mind Turner’s marine paintings bordering on abstraction, in which the brilliant sunbeams piercing a hazy sky and the glittering sparkle of the sea are as much if not more the subject of the painting than boats or battles. I remembered that Olitski once had the nerve to say that he wanted to hang the weather. But these new paintings are too physically substantial, too aggressively and materially present to suggest ephemeral phenomena. They are very much mood pictures, in the sense of Whistler’s poetic nocturnes. And the gem intensity of rich color suspended in crystalline surfaces brings to mind the deliberately
perfumed palette of the Symbolist painters like Redon and Moreau. For these complex works are rich with associations, allusions and the kind of metaphoric analogies associated with the Surrealists’ call for a peinture-poesie that informs Pollock’s work with poignance and meaning. Knowing Olitski lives on two islands — one off the coast of New Hampshire during the warm months, the other a small Florida key where he has his winter studio — tempts one to make associations with seascapes and beaches. But that would be to trivialize the work and to misunderstand the painter’s intentions. For Olitski has been clear about his goals as an artist: to create new visual phenomena, to give pleasure to the senses and to elevate the human spirit. States of feeling, not scenery, are his subject. His goals have been the objectives of artists in the “high” civilizations which considered aesthetics an important branch of philosophy, and the arts the measure of the achievement of a culture. We have come a long way since then; “humanism” is suspect in many circles, on both the left and the right of the political spectrum. Olitski cares as little for such mass media imperatives as Baudelaire or Rimbaud did of the criticism of the newly powerful bourgeois press. Germane to a discussion of Olitski’s paintings is the curious and unexpected symmetry between the situation of the arts at the end of this century and that of the nineteenth century fin-de-siècle: a tired and demoralized atmosphere of torpid malaise demands ever more shocking and scandalous provocation to elicit even a bored yawn from a desensitized public. Like the waning years of the nineteenth century, the end of this century has seen the rise of a new class whose tastes have not changed as rapidly as their fortunes. The cultural limitations of the new rich popularizes pretentious iconography, familiar subject matter and erotic sensationalism. This is the taste that drove the prices of the Salon painters through the roof; one need only look at current auction results to see that it is back today with a vengeance. With this big difference: the official art of the end of this century still comes essentially out of art
Opposite: First Day, 1991 (detail)
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11. MIRAC LE WALL, 1991
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