Out With A Bang

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The New York Sun

This exhibition of late paintings of Jules Olitski, who died earlier this year at age 84, is subtitled “A Celebration” — an apt name for such festive and colorful paintings. But these works equally bring to mind volcanic eruptions or intergalactic collisions. Worked with impasto so intense that the encrusted surfaces appear to belong as much to bas relief as to paint on canvas, they emulate geological formation both in physical fact and suggested scenes. Even if the world ends with a whimper, Jules Olitski departed with a bang.

The subtitle is also apropos for a gentle giant of an abstractionist who adopted as his personal, anti-entitlement motto: “expect nothing, do your work, and celebrate.” “Bathsheba Reverie — Yellow and Black” (2001), like all works here in acrylic paint on canvas, has at its base a disintegrating orb in fiery yellow, which dominates the composition, and is cracking, seemingly under the sheer weight of its drying pigment. It inhabits a rich but ambiguous pocket of space that is itself contained by a monochrome purple ground just spied around its edges. Roughly an oval shape, this space looks like a puddle still in formation, perhaps about to submerge the entirety of the purple ground: Lush and painterly, it has an atmospheric quality that recalls a sky by Constable or Turner.

“Temptation: Yellow” (2002) also has a crusty nebulous shape in yellow, like some meteorite being flung through space, keeping company with orbs in reddish orange and green. Little rivulets within these thick orbs could have formed in the drying process or may have been forced into the paint, wet on wet. Such ambiguity of means and affect — wet or dry, fast or slow, abstract or depictive, microcosm or macrocosm — typifies this restless romantic. For despite undogmatic views on the formal and interpretative issues surrounding his work, Olitski’s was an art that embraced extremes.

Many works in this show, including “Temptation: Yellow,” adopt a raggedly-dispatched, nervous line around the edge of the rectangle, often in a brashly contrastive color, that registers as a kind of framing device. Sometimes, as in “Memoirs: Yellow and White” (2003), there are two lines, a thicker one in red overlapped by a thinner in yellow. These brilliant colors retain their chromatic identity despite the rapidity and fluidity of paint application, and stand in exhilarated contrast to the somber yet fiery melancholy of the slow burning golds, which read like flames against a night sky. The red and yellow stand proud, almost popping off the picture plane, whereas the scene they frame seems set within deep space.

Late style is considered one of the greatest gifts an artist can enjoy: the ability to sum up one’s achievements and push to new heights. Often it is characterized by looseness and urgency. In the case of Olitski, it is hard to say whether he really had a late style, however, as throughout his career he oscillated between extremes of flatness and impasto, sparsity and density. You could say that he always painted in a late style, in that risk and exuberance were his hallmarks.

In some works, however, there does seem to be some conscious dialogue with an earlier career moment. “Patutsky Embraced: Orange and Green” (2005) takes its title from the nickname his stepfather gave him, in playful reference to the Polish aristocratic revolutionary Stanislaw Felix Potocki — a name Olitski had also used for some of his classic 1960s spray paintings, such as “Prince Patutsky’s Command” in the National Gallery of Australia. This late painting captures a molten, liquid fireball against a fierce black ground, dazzlingly framed within a yellow stripe, and with frenetic dabs of turquoise striped below. The title — as wild a gesture as the fierce, brushy intermingling of orange and yellow on the canvas — could equally be read in relation to his raffish ’60s modernist self as a peace offering or a riposte.

* * *

Where Olitski was blessed with an old-age style, his fellow luminary of Color Field abstraction, Morris Louis, died of lung cancer just shy of his 50th birthday in 1962. While there are no turns and returns within his oeuvre to complicate the Louis legacy, his critical position had been closely tied to the fluctuating fortunes of his formalist champions. The works, however, seem so fresh as to make all this seem like ancient history. The display of seven canvases at Paul Kasmin is a serious incentive to make the trek quickly to Washington, D.C., where a year-long traveling retrospective closes January 6 at the Hirshhorn Museum. If these are canvases that did not make the cut, the museum’s standards must be high, indeed.

“Gamma Omicron” (1960) is an example of what are called his “Unfurleds”: simple-looking, though elaborately constructed, stain paintings in which poured stripes of pure acrylic color define diagonals in the lower corners of an otherwise virgin canvas. The stripes wend their way from the sides toward a hypothetical, central “vanishing point,” though the use of a term from perspective seems especially out of place in so emphatically flat a pictorial mode. The resulting shapes of these lines, some of which overlap slightly, are insouciantly organic: Though resulting from chance they have the purposive elegance of twigs or fingers.

“7 Bronze” (1958) belongs to his “Veils” series: great, dense blocks of poured stainage that form a shape that almost entirely fills the canvas, looking like a giant X-ray of teeth. “Dalet Aleph,” also of 1958, in acrylic resin, stands black against the raw canvas to form vital negative spaces that bring to mind an eroded coastal rock formation such as Etretat, the Normandy landmark favored by Courbet, Monet, and Matisse.

It is interesting that such radical and purist abstraction should elicit these romantic, landscape references. (That said, Kasmin’s show lacks one of his “Stripes” series from 1961 in which color reaches a pinnacle of unromatically hard-edged crispness that would offset these impressions.) Maybe knowing of Olitski’s turn towards allusion — and that of Helen Frankenthaler as well — prompts this way of “misreading” Louis. Or else, had he lived, this is where Louis’s work would have propelled him.

Olitski until January 5 (19 E. 70th St., between Madison and Fifth avenues, 212-794-0550);

Louis until January 19 (293 Tenth Ave. at 27th Street, 212-563-4474).


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