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Art © Estate of Jules Olitski/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY


Shoot

1965
acrylic on canvas
94 in. x 98 in. (238.76 cm x 248.92 cm)
Museum Purchase: Gift of the Friends and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1977.40

Jules Olitski
American
1922–2007

ON VIEW

Jules Olitski was a pioneering figure in 1960s Color Field painting. Born in Russia in 1922, Olitski was a year old when he arrived in the United States with his mother and grandmother. Growing up in Brooklyn and Long Island, he confirmed his desire to be an artist after visits to the Brooklyn Museum and the 1939 New York World's Fair. Study at the National Academy of Design and the Beaux Arts Institute soon followed, and under the influence of painter Victor Thall (active mid-20th cent.), Olitski began to paint in a manner reminiscent of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) and the French Fauves. Olitski later traveled to France for further study and, inspired by Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985) and other contemporary European artists, began to sculpt and paint in a semi-abstract mode.

Following his first one-person exhibition, held in Paris in 1951, Olitski returned to New York and pursued degrees in art education from New York University. Professional duties competed with his painting, and it was not until 1958 that Olitski held his first one-person exhibition in the United States. Heavily impastoed compositions made up the bulk of his work at this time, but by 1960, Olitksi would begin to privilege color over texture, using poured dye on canvas. He experimented with spray application, and in 1964 he made his first large "spray" painting. The artist was widely praised for both the innovation and beauty of his subsequent canvases, but by the early 1970s his work had begun to fall out of favor with New York critics. In the years that followed, Olitski remained popular with collectors but was increasingly ignored by the art press. His contributions to the development of modern art remain undeniable, however, and Olitski, evidently unperturbed, continues to pursue his own direction. Since the mid-1990s he has been engaged in a series of landscape paintings based on the scenery near his home on Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

The Currier's Shoot, executed in 1965, is an early example of Olitski's spray painting technique. Consisting of misty veils of pinks, oranges, and blues, the painting would seem almost a three-dimensional rendering of brilliantly colored fog were it not for the vertical bands of green and red that run alongside the left margin of the canvas. These arbitrary intrusions call attention to the boundaries of the canvas, reminding the viewer that the painting is fundamentally flat, that no illusion is intended, and that color is the first and only subject.

Reacting against the theatrical and self-referential qualities of Abstract Expressionism, Olitski during the 1960s sought to create purely visual works that repudiated both illusionism and the hand of the artist himself. After first experimenting with poured dye, he discovered the airbrush, which allowed him to make compositions that denied the touch of brush to canvas. At the same time, the airbrush introduced an element of randomness to the application of paint that effectively counteracted the overly orchestrated brushwork of Abstract Expressionism. Avoiding the structural power and narrative melodrama of the slashing brushstroke, Olitski worked with tiny floating droplets of spray to create insubstantial and serene films of paint whose primary aspect is color rather than facture.

Independent of all but the barest references to modernist theories (acknowledging the flatness of the canvas, for example), Olitski's paintings became expositions of color for its own sake. Unfortunately, the luminous and frankly beautiful colors chosen by the artist led many critics to dismiss his paintings as empty decoration. Shoot amply demonstrates Olitski's preference for radiant pinks and oranges, and in contrast to the deliberate experimentation with color relationships seen in the paintings of Josef Albers (q.v.) or Hans Hofmann (q.v.), the Currier painting offers no explanations for its indulgent presentation of visually appealing tones. To do so, Olitski seems to say, would only add unwanted layers of meaning to his canvas.

In the same spirit of divorcing meaning from visuality, Olitski's titles have little direct correlation with his paintings and are seemingly unimportant. In 1990, when asked about the significance of the title, Shoot, the artist responded that he did not remember why he chose the title. He noted that it probably had a "personal meaning at the time" but was devoid of any "universal significance."(1)

Shoot entered the collection of the Currier Museum of Art in 1977.

VSD

NOTE

1. Typescript notes of a telephone interview between Jules Olitski and John R. Stomberg, Currier Gallery of Art, February 7, 1990. Contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCE

Kenworth Moffett. Jules Olitski. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1981.


Exhibition
1979 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Friends of The Currier Gallery of Art: 20 Years of Acquisition." Jan. 12 - Feb. 25.

1984 Currier Gallery of Art, Manchester, NH, "Friends of The Currier Gallery of Art: 25 Years of Acquisitions." Jan. 8 - Feb. 12.

1985 Lamont Gallery, Phillips Exeter Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, "Jules Olitski." Sept. 7 - Oct. 13.

2008 Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH, "In the Artist's Words."

Provenance
Lee Gallery, Belmont, MA
Purchased by Currier Gallery of Art, 1977


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