Jules Olitski
Jules Olitski
American, 1922-2007
Person TypeIndividual
Terms
- Male
Native American, Cherokee, born 1935
Mississippi band of Choctaw/Cherokee, born 1972
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BiographyJules Olitski (American, 1922 - 2007) was one of the major Color Field painters to emerge in the 1950s. Born in Ukrainian SSR, his father was executed a few months after he was born and he emigrated to the US with his mother and grandmother when he was still an infant. Raised in Brooklyn, Olitski studied art at the National Academy of Design in New York in the early 1940’s. In his early career, Olitski created paintings with abstract shapes layered with thick, impasto surfaces. Later, he began layering thin films of spray paint onto his canvases, creating a trademark atmospheric effect, unusual color harmonies and chromatic shifts. Olitski was trying to evoke density and fullness in his experimentation with this new technique. Above all, these paintings were about scale and vivid color. In 1969, Olitski became the first living artist to be featured in a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. His works are included in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Canada in Ontario, the Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan and the Cincinnati Museum of Art, Ohio, among many others.