Word: canvases
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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These works, executed during the fifties are followed by a totally different type of canvases, stained with multiple circles and enclosing arcs. The colors are simple, usually those of unmixed acrylics on raw canvas. Resemblances to the work of Gottlieb and Louis are clear...
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...
IN THE "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...
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...
...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...