Word: olitski
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Harvard's first exhibition of significant contemporary painting is now at the Fogg. Junior fellow Michael Fried has gathered nineteen major works by Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, and Frank Stella into a comprehensive statement of abstract art of the mid-sixties...
...with Olitski's suffused surfaces of color and Noland's sharp, penetrating angles of color. It there is freedom and movement in the formalized schemes of the three painters, it is a hard-won emerging vitality...
Different colors have different densities, feel nearer, more vibrant or softer than others; as in Olitski's subtle color washes. Those are predominently on a flat surface. The importance of the surface in contemperary art is brilliantly discussed by Fried in the "nexus o formal "nexus of formal issues" contained in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition: The first of "these issues concerns the ability of line, in modernist painting . . . to be read as bounding a shape or figure, whether abstract or representational...
Michael Fried's essay deserves the attention of the viewers. It yields a greatly increased sense of what is "going on" in Stella, Noland, and Olitski and how they follow preceding abstract paintings by Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Morris Louis. The key ideas and the observations contained in Fried's essay reveal the paintings in the show as a fascinating world of color and form...
Before proceeding to a tour of the major galleries, two institutional events should be noted. First, the Fogg Museum at Harvard is now showing "Three Americans," a display consisting of six monumental paintings each by Noland, Olitski, and Stella. Michael Fried, who organized the exhibit, considers these three young artists to be among the best in the world today...