Word: olitski
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...PAINT a picture like this required Olitski to paint his way through years of difficulty. The earliest paintings included in the show are a whole room full of small works which look like abstract expressionist paintings, but were executed by building up the surface as much as three inches with spackle. The effect is that of stale cake frosting, limited to three colors -- charcoal, sickly pink, and dirty white -- knifed or squeezed onto the canvas. The paintings suggest parody of the rough, sculptural brush work of De Kooning, at the same time evidencing an interest in the ease with which...
...Olitski's "break-through" -- the sudden leap from mediocre early work so characteristic of modern painting -- occurs in 1964 with paintings like Deep Drag. Here Olitski turns to a rectilinear ordering of the forms: the circles are still there, but they have been driven to the edges where they interact with long, brushed forms to shape out a composition clearly accepting the limits of the frame. (Eventually those circles will be reduced to thumbprints on the smooth field, and finally can be observed as mere drops.) Olitski's characteristic banishment of all drawing to the edges of the canvas appears...
...MATURE" works -- from the late sixties to date -- Olitski creates paintings that are models of what a good abstract painting should be. The problem of uniting form and content, honesty and illusion is made almost symbolically explicit by the use of the inner color field and its surrounding borders. Each of those elements, in turn, has both a formal and a sensual function. The formal solution of drawing at the edge of the canvas satisfies a felt need to reflect the frame in the structure of the painting, but also allows old style, "painterly" handling to survive. (The styles...
...sign that Olitski preserves "sensuousness" in painting is the feeling that we are free to like or dislike the paintings on subjective grounds: the paintings are about color combinations which, with all their attendant moods and meanings, we either enjoy...
...When Olitski fails, it is by slipping off into one of the surrounding extremes. Pink Alert, the painting that stands at the entrance to the exhibit, demonstrates the original ideas executed at their best, with the edging strokes well defined, scaled and composed, and the gradation of the color field maintaining a lush, breathing "all-over-ness." But when the borders are reduced to chalk lines in the outer inch of the painting, they tend to slide down into the narrow recess between canvas and metal frame, and let the color field dissipate back into a flat canvas flatly painted...