Jules Olitski

Paul Kasmin Gallery, London
Christie's East, New York, November 10, 1999, Lot 248
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

The lush chromatic surface of The Abbas Palace illuminates the brilliance of Jules Olitski’s series of stained paintings begun in 1961 and culminating in 1964, the year this picture was painted.  Olitski used thinned down water-based acrylics to soak the pigment into the monumental sized, unprimed canvas.  Moving away from his earlier body of heavily impastoed canvases, Olitski shifted towards the large scale and color centric themes that dominated the art world at that moment.  Working in a strain similar to Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Olistki developed a new body of work based on the staining technique.  Rubbing and soaking the pigments into the canvas, the colors become imbedded into the fabric weave, seeming to be more an inherent quality of the surface, rather than building up from and on top of the surface.  The act of 'staining' using thinned down pigment, allows a consistent, smooth texture – a continuous surface quality extended over both painted and raw canvas.  This weightless quality adds an ethereal power to the brilliant and vivid color fields.  Color is the main expressive agent and the composition is devoid of sharp boundaries and linear supremacy.  In The Abbas Palace, named after the 17^th Century Isfahan Palace of Iranian ruler Shah Abbas, the undulating broad bands of color cascade down from the upper right corner towards the lower left.  The colors seem to be isolated, polarizing forces.  The small red orb rests within the band of unprimed canvas – the void being as active an element as the stained color fields – sustains the weight of the larger area of yellow and green.  The end result of these seemingly disparate colors is a harmonious and balanced composition that captures the triumph of Color Field painting.