On Wednesday, which also happens to be the first day of Passover, the Jewish-American painter Jules Olitski will be eighty years old. Today’s picture is his biblically titled and explosively colourful Bathsheba Reverie – Yellow, one of a number of recent canvases by the artist currently on show at the Bernard Jacobson Gallery in London. This is Olitski’s first exhibition in this country for a long while. It may also turn out to be his last, given his advanced age and the fact that he has been fighting stomach cancer for several years. But do not count on it. He has a way of disproving morbid predictions concerning his wellbeing. On current evidence there is plenty of vigour in him yet.
Olitski has lived an eventful life. Born in the Ukraine, his mother took him to New York while he was still in his infancy, following the execution of his father in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. One of the formative experiences of his teenage years was that of seeing a group of paintings by Rembrandt at the New York World’s Fair in 1939. Olitski enrolled as an art student not long afterwards, although his education was interrupted by World War II, in which he served from 1942 until 1945. Subsequently, under the terms of the G.I. Bill, he was enabled to study in Paris, where he was impressed by the works of Picasso and the Surrealists. He engaged in his own version of a Surrealist experiment by painting pictures while wearing a blindfold. The results, apparently, were not very good. He destroyed them all, but remained an inveterately experimental painter.
Back in America in the mid-1960s Olitski was one of the first fine artists to apply paint to his canvases using a spray gun....
