Page 44 - Studio International - September 1968

London commentaries

Jules Olitski already saturated with colour—sometimes wet with and yet to make them count pictorially, Olitski
at the Kasmin Gallery colour—this development will be as free as it can be must have reached the most direct, most unself-
kept from internal organization of a linear, formal conscious identification of the formal demands of
nature. In some of Matisse's late papiers découpés, the picture he is making with his own needs for
Olitski's art has recently been written about in the like the Women and monkeys of 1952, some of the personal expression through painterly action.
kind of superlatives one would like to see reserved same priorities operate. The sheets of white paper There is something almost dandyish in the cool
for painters whose formal innovations derive from are not mounted on board until the colours which bravura with which he underlines the risks he is
the compulsion to open painting to major ex- are imposed upon them have established their own taking with his painting at the very moment it
perience. Is Olitski a painter of the 'highest limits, often overlapping the original ground so approaches completion.
quality' (Geldzahler), a 'major painter at the that the overall shape has to be extended to em- By the terms within which he is working, Olitski
height of his powers' (Fried), or are we in danger of brace the experience of colour for which it is the is successful when the establishing of an edge
confusing success, within an area which has now vehicle. Through a succession of additions and completes a picture formally at the same time as it
been well defined, with quality? Olitski has al- subtractions the overall composition in colour is exhausts the need or emotion which sustained the
ready proved an extremely influential painter and developed free from any preconception of overall activity of its making. He needs to pace himself, as
it seems to me inevitable that the issues he has shape. In a successful painting by Olitski, as in it were, like a long-distance runner for the final
raised will continue to be central for the develop- these late works of Matisse, the shape finally winning burst which will exhaust the last of his
ment of one kind of painting for some time to achieved will be that which best displays the colour energy. The only art I can think of which demands
come. But a contribution to the technical and it contains. Once the shape of the painting has been the same combination of passion and pacing is the
formal development of painting is not of itself a established, Olitski recognizes it with a series of art of making love.
guarantee of absolute quality except where quality broad strokes of impasto, laid on with a brush and Dimensions, once established, are marked by
itself is judged exclusively in terms of a modernist obviously put on fast. Where the painting is these boundary lines. In Yellow Looshe, the finest
tradition and its progress. successful these marks act like keys which lock painting in the exhibition at KASMIN's, the dia-
Olitski's paintings, like Noland's, tend to be the painting into its final form, tensing the whole gonal lie of deeply saturated yellow makes itself
painted on large sheets of unstretched material. colour shape. In the history of painting colour has felt as an emphasis of a certain weight and intensity
This means that the development of colour will tended to operate within an area defined by line. in relation to the height and the horizontal extent
decide the shape of the painting (Tainting is made Here line operates at the dictates of colour—a of the whole painting. The shape is made memor-
from inside out'—Olitski in Artforum January 1967) reflection of Olitski's acceptance of the inevitability able as a particular thing by what it contains.
and because, at a certain stage in the painting of edge as a drawn line. To be in a position to make Where we have so little to relate to, the mood
of these pictures, colour is sprayed onto a surface these marks, to make them so definitely and so fast must register on us unmistakably and directly