Jules Olitski
Works available
Untitled (No. 7)
1968
Aluminium with air drying lacquer
274 × 442 × 366 cm / 9ft x 14ft6 × 3ft8 ins
Biography
(1922- 2007)
Born in Gomel, Russia, in 1922, Jules Olitski lived in New York from the age of two, and became an American national after serving in the United States army during the Second World War. He attended the National Academy of Design in New York from 1940-42, and later studied in Paris from 1949-50, where he had a solo show of paintings at Galerie Huit in 1950.
Back in America in the late 1950s he became friends with the American formalist art critic Clement Greenberg and in 1960 began to experiment with different ways of applying paint onto large canvases, producing his first spray-painted pictures in 1965. Working at St. Neots in England in 1968, he took this method a stage further in his first large-scale sculptural works. During a period of seven weeks, he produced a series of sprayed aluminium sculptures incorporating multiple elements - curved planes, circular and elliptical forms and standing tubes - of which Untitled (No. 7), displayed at the New Art Centre, is an example. In 1969 this work was one of a series of large, aluminum, spray-painted sculptures exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Olitski was the first living American artist to be given a one-person exhibition there.
The artist was given a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1973. In the seventies and eighties he returned to painting and took up printmaking, producing a large output of graphic work. His work appears in major public collections throughout America and internationally.