Olitski, Jules

Olitski, Jules (1922– ). Russian-born American painter and sculptor, one of the leading figures of Post-Painterly Abstraction, specifically of Colour Field Painting. He was born in Snovsk in the Ukraine shortly after his father was executed for political offences and was brought to the USA by his mother and grandmother in 1923. His main training was at the Art Students League, New York, 1939–42. In 1949–51 he travelled in Europe and studied sculpture under Zadkine in Paris. His early paintings were influenced by Fauvism and he then went on to heavily-textured abstracts, but in 1960 the direction of his work changed radically when he began experimenting with stain techniques in the manner of Frankenthaler and Louis. In 1964 he began using a spray gun and in the second half of the 1960s he developed the type of painting for which he is best known—vast canvases covered with luscious mists of atmospheric colour; he said that ideally he would like ‘nothing but some colours sprayed into the air and staying there'. Sometimes there are some heavier touches at the edges of the canvas in a sort of ironic reference to Abstract Expressionism, and in the 1970s Olitski returned to a more textural handling of paint, often reducing his colours to delicate modulations of greys and browns. He took up sculpture seriously in 1968 and has worked mainly with painted steel.