RIP Jules Olitski

Jules Olitski was 84 years old. Jules Olitski

American painter and sculptor Jules Olitski, a prominent representative of the postwar abstract art movement, died of cancer on Sunday, February 4, in New York, reports the Austrian paper Der Standard. (Via Artforum)

Sand of the Sea Jules Olitski

Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, Russia, on March 27 1922, a few months after his father, a commissar, was executed by the Russian government. (via Wikipedia)

See Jules’s painting “Volitions” from “Modern and Postmodern” (the last essay by Clement Greenberg).

You don’t have to think that Jules Olitski is ”the best painter alive,” as an unrepentant Clement Greenberg did as late as 1990, to appreciate his current show. Mr. Olitski, who has exhibited since 1951, has never given up on Color Field painting, the art movement that Greenberg promoted as the rightful heir to Abstract Expressionism; but he has made it quirkier, more complicated and, well, less Greenbergian. (Roberta Smith’s review of his show)

Jules Olitski aping Jean Arp
Mushroom Perfume

More paintings here
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Obit from Iconia and from Jules’ granddaughter.

More on Olitski’s motivation and how he was rescued by Clement G. from Art or Idiocy.

The Grey Jules Olitski Xavier University Collection.