Jules Olitski; abstract artist favored use of spray gun
WASHINGTON -- Jules Olitski, 84, an American artist who rose to prominence in the 1960s as part of the art movement known as color field painting, died of complications from cancer Feb. 4 at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
Mr. Olitski eliminated brushstrokes from his work by using stains and a spray gun to paint large canvases with delicate mists of brightly hued colors. The results were flat, one-dimensional pieces that, reviewers said, gave a sense of continuation beyond the borders of the paintings.
The idea of spatial flow was a major concept of Mr. Olitski and other avant-garde color field painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, Larry Poons, Jack Bush, and Kenneth Noland.
Championed by art critic Clement Greenberg, Mr. Olitski gained popularity among the second generation of abstract expressionists.
In 1966, Mr. Olitski, Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ellsworth Kelly were selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale contemporary art exhibition.
The following year, Mr. Olitski had his first solo museum exhibit at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, which awarded him the Corcoran Gold Medal and the William A.C. Clark Prize.
Mr. Olitski, who since 1978 mostly worked out of his home studio in Meredith, N.H., demonstrated a keen imagination as he created a vast amount of art over the course of his career -- stacked metal sculptures, paintings, silk-screens -- all mainly abstract.
His style evolved with his landscape paintings, which featured expanses of solid colors with dabs of paint and textured shapes.
"All I'm doing when I'm making a painting is making a painting," Mr. Olitski said in a New York Sun article last year. "I'm not sure even when I'm making a landscape that I'm making a landscape. Here is a bird and here is a horizon. I'm still making a structure that has to work."
Mr. Olitski showed his work in more than 150 exhibits, including at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
His pieces are held in public collections at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dallas Museum of Art, at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington.
