Word: olitski
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...Greenberg's various followers. A fine recent example is the catalogue to the exhibition staged by the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and tendentiously titled The Great Decade of American Abstraction: Modernist Art 1960 to 1970. With preposterous promotional excess, the catalogue informs readers that what artists like Olitski, Noland, Louis and Friedel Dzubas produced in America in the 1960s can be compared in quality with the work of the impressionists between 1865 and 1875, and Braque, Picasso and Matisse between...
...defiance of the edges. This occurs particularly in the earlier sprayed canvases, when the field begins to look like a random set of tones instead of a unified surface in controlled transition. Danger here also takes the form of boring all-over-ness in a few paintings where Olitski attempts to place one plane of color on top of another, binding the second plane into the picture by making it recede on one side and advance on the other. And then there is the tendency of the paintings to turn into portraits of deep space, flecked with stars (the science...
...OUTSTANDING thing is that, treading his course between all these dangers, Olitski manages to avoid most of them in about a third of the paintings. In an art of such delicacy, that is many more than it seems...
...addition, he conquers many of the problems of scale which have bothered some other abstractionists, particularly Kenneth Noland. Abstract pictures have usually been able to be successful only on enormous canvases; Olitski works equally well in room-sized paintings and in small ones. His spray technique has a finer grain, so to speak, than staining or brushing, and it creates surfaces which because they cover the canvas completely are not immediately scaled by the weave of the cloth. And in his paintings of this year and last, particularly the Other Flesh series, he employs rollers and sponges with a syrupy...
...Olitski is clearly still exploring the ideas with which he has had such success so far, and his work promises further advances in a form -- the easel painting -- which since the century began has continually been being saved from the edge of apparent extinction...