Jules Olitski

After discharge from the Army in 1945, Olitski married Gladys Katz and then stayed with Leo and Alma Gershenson in Asheville, North Carolina.

In Paris he saw the European modern masters and engaged in severe self-analysis, which involved painting while blindfolded to remove himself from all of his customary habits and facility.

He returned to New York, and reacting against the color and imagery of his Paris works, began to paint monochromatic pictures with empty centers.

[1] In 1960 Olitski abruptly moved away from the heavily encrusted abstract surfaces he had evolved and began to stain the canvas with large areas of thin, brightly colored dyes.

His style "combined the titanic reverb of Mark Rothko with the mischievous optical winks Wassily Kandinsky made famous".

In the 1970s Olitski returned to the thick impasto surfaces that characterized his work in the 1950s but with innovative techniques that took advantage of the newly improved polymer and gel acrylic mediums.

[6] In 2024, Olitski's work was included in Every Sound Is a Shape of Time: Selections from PAMM's Collection at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, alongside modern and contemporary artists Mark Bradford, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Serra, and Louis Morris, among others.

[9] "Karen Wilkin writes in The New Criterion, January, 2021 "Olitski is...one of the most radical and innovative abstract painters of the recent past."

Jules Olitski in New York" Karen Wilkin, New Criterion[10] Swedish art critic Ulf Linde mentions Olitski as an example of "visual muzak" in the interview text Om det genant enkla (Eng: About that which is awkwardly simple)[11] New York Times art critic Roberta Smith says in her October 14, 2005 review that Olitski is "...an artist who, if he hasn't quite come full circle, has always combined a penchant for flash and visual drama with a keen interest in the physicality of paint, whether thin, as in his stained and spray-painted abstractions of the 1960s, or thick", accessed online November 26, 2007