Jules Olitski

Seamless layers of intense color intermingling to create an effect of airy clouds of paint made a huge impact in the Art World for Jules Olitski in the mid 1960s. Olitski's objective was to take paint beyond the boundaries both of the canvas and of the artist's brush. He pioneered the technique of using a high-powered industrial spray gun to paint on unprimed canvas. Patutsky in Paradise is probably the best example of this stage of his work. He was also a printmaker and sculptor, exhibiting – as the first living American artist to do so - large aluminum spray-painted sculptures in a one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. Jules Olitski studied in New York and Paris after WWI and went on to develop a style combining Parisian influences with American Abstract Expressionism. The 1950s saw him experimenting with various mediums and exhibiting with such 2nd Generation Color Field Painters as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland. By the mid 1960s his need to escape the limitations of the canvas led him to move beyond it to achieve the luminous fields of sprayed color for which he became known. During the later decades of the 20th century, Jules Olitski continued to experiment with the interaction of light and color, often returning to heavy brushwork using polymer and gel acrylics, and moving back to thicker layers of pigment. This work was not so well-received and he was seen as less at the forefront of the Color Field movement than Louis, Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. During his final years, tastes changed again, and his work became more popular. Today, it is exhibited in major collections around the world including the Guggenheim and the Tate, and retrospectives have recognized the importance of his influence on younger generations of abstract painters. (Artist website)