Date: 24-03-2002
Owning Institution: Bernard Jacobson Gallery
Publication:           Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:         Now    

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. He became well known as one of “The Colour Field Painters”. Whereas the previous generation of American painters, the Abstract Expressionists, had tried to make the movements and rhythms performed in the act of painting as visible as possible, Olitski and his contemporaries took a less self-assertive approach. For them, a picture did not necessarily have to bear the autograph traces of its creator’s hand; it did not even necessarily have to look hand-made. “What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of colour that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape,” Olitski declared.

Given such an apparently mild, hedonistic ambition – a case not so much of art-for-art’s-sake as colour-for-colour’s-sake – it might seem odd that he should have become a figure of controversy. But that is exactly what Olitski was for a decade and more, thanks largely to the support shown for his work by the influential critic Clement Greenberg. Representational art, Greenberg suggested, had by the mid-1960s gone into a self-evident decline. He argued that the work of Olitski and his contemporaries pointed the way to a new world of attitudes and responses to art, in which the appreciation of paint and paint alone would reach a new pitch of subtlety: “Shall we continue to regret the three-dimensional illusion in painting? Perhaps not. Connoisseurs of the future … may find in the concreteness of colour and shape relations more ‘human interest’ than in the extra-pictorial references of old-time illusionist art.

As the heat went out of that particular debate, and as his kind of painting came to seem less of a battleground and more of an accepted area of artistic practice, critical interest in Olitski’s work waned. But he kept on (and keeps on) working, continuing to use spray-paint but also, as in the case of the picture reproduced here, painting with brushes. Now that art history has passed him by – whether temporarily or not – he seems to feel a new freedom. He wrote about it recently in an entertaining autobiographical essay, “How My Art Gets Made”:

“In the bedroom darkness I may visualise a way of making a painting. I can see it – if I do this and this and that and this, my God! Why I haven’t I seen this until now? I can hardly wait to get to the studio and make the vision real. Alas, all too often, the dream turns into a mud puddle. I am left looking at a disaster. What to do! Keep working. I ask the Almighty for help. That frees me. Look at what He is able to do with a handful of dust and arib, and here I am with all this paint and a brush and my life in my hands, and all I need to do is make a good work of art…”

The title of  Bathsheba Reverie – Yellow is a tease, raising the question of how a black blob floating on a field of incandescent, acid colours might relate to the Old Testament story of Bathsheba, wife of Uriah the Hittite, shamefully seduced and impregnated by David. Perhaps Olitski’s love of Rembrandt contains a clue. His title recalls Rembrandt’s famous depiction of Bathsheba (now in the Louvre) musing on the fateful consequences of her pregnancy. Olitski’s own painting may also embody a form of mixed emotional musing. Its brilliant hues are those of a splendid sunset but at the same time its diffuse, exploded aspect calls to mind the nebulae of some far-off galaxy. Like most so-called “non-representational” or “abstract” paintings, it actually represents all kinds of things, strongly evoking – to me, at least – Olitski’s sense of his own energy, and his feelings of connectedness to the universe at large. Then there is the matter of the large black blob, suspended almost dead centre over the heart of the picture. What might that represent? The painter’s sense of mortality perhaps, of the shadow that falls over every life as it approaches its end. It might even be his way of painting his disease, in which case Olitski himself is the Bathsheba of his title, powerfully aware of the cancer, rather than the child, growing within him. This interpretation might help to explain why the serpentine orange forms running around the periphery of the picture look so much like intestines.

All of which may, of course, be gibberish of the first order; so I will let the painter himself have the last word. He ended his recent autobiographical essay with the mantra that he constantly repeats to himself: “Expect nothing. Do your work. Celebrate!” Happy birthday, Jules Olitski.