SPOTLIGHT: Jules Olitski: “There can be few more satisfying painters to discover for the first time than Mr. Jules Olitski.”

So began a review of Olitski’s Spring 1964 exhibition at Kasmin, Ltd. in the Times of London. On view were several of the artist’s recent works—boldly colored abstractions with funky shapes and provocative titles. When Olitski’s work emerged in the early 1960s, geometry and hard-edged painting were predominant. Color Field artists like Kenneth Noland and Frank Stella had eliminated visible brushwork and autographic gestures in their paintings, focusing instead on such essentials as color, shape, edge, and line. This project of reducing painting to its basics preoccupied many artists during this period.

Olitski advanced a different approach to abstraction. His more playful, mischievous sensibility was evident in paintings like Prince Patutszky Pleasures (1962), which is composed of awkwardly nestling ellipses and ovals, and painted with luscious pinks and regal purples. At the same time, Olitski’s work demonstrated his formal intelligence, as he imaginatively addressed the same pictorial “problems” posed by Stella and Noland. For example, with only three broad forms in Cadmium Orange of Dr. Frankenstein (1963), Olitski guides the viewer’s eye around a vast surface and neutralizes the canvas edge as a boundary. That is, our eye completes the curves of the orange and red shapes that are cut off by the edge of the painting.

1964 was a pivotal year for the artist. While teaching at Bennington College in Vermont, Olitski became intrigued by the idea of composing a painting using color alone. He was particularly interested in the weight and mass of color, and how it could be wielded to suggest visual speed and direction. To this end, he ceased drawing distinct shapes and began to flood his canvases with expansive washes (or “curtains”) of pigment. The monumental Flaming On, with its warm palette, subtly shifting between rusty orange and saturated red, developed out of this pursuit. Olitski employed a “stain” technique in this work, using diluted acrylic paint soaked into the weave of the canvas to create an ethereal, seemingly weightless surface. In contrast to the flat, static paint coating of many abstract artworks, the stained surface of Flaming On pulses and breathes, and at height of twelve feet, the painting immerses the viewer in its flowing color.

A number of Olitski’s “Curtain” paintings, including Flaming On, appeared in his March 1965 exhibition at New York’s Poindexter Gallery, where they further established his reputation as a major force in contemporary art. “The structure of these paintings,” art historian Michael Fried wrote in Artforum, “requires for its apprehension a more acute attendance to the interaction of colors than any painting since Matisse.” Recognized for their exceptional quality, several of the “Curtain” paintings have since entered major museum collections in the United States and Europe. Tin Lizzie Green was purchased by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Prince Patutsky’s Gamble made its way to the collection of Düsseldorf’s Kunstpalast; and Green Rose was donated the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas just four years after it was painted. About the “Curtain” paintings, the art critic Clement Greenberg wrote:

"Olitski has turned out what I don't hesitate to call masterpieces in every phase of his art. The masterpieces do seem to increase in frequency as color is given more and more rein. Olitski's previous phase, that of 1964-1965 in which he made tall, deeply stained pictures… was already a climax, and a momentous on."

Flaming On’s all over, edge-to-edge field of color, framed by quirkily contrasting tones, became a staple of the artist’s subsequent work, both in his later ‘60s “Spray” paintings and his more austere monochromes of the 1970s. A product of the artist’s restless curiosity and an experimental temperament, this painting shows Olitski at the height of his powers.

Flaming On has a particularly robust exhibition history. In April 1965, the painting was showcased in the epochal exhibition Three American Painters: Noland, Olitski, Stella curated by Michael Fried at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. This show, and Fried’s accompanying text, quickly became a touchstone for the art of the 1960s, and has remained a subject of scholarship ever since. Flaming On was soon acquired by Los Angeles art collector and philanthropist Robert A. Rowan, who helped bring the Harvard exhibition to its second destination, the Pasadena Art Museum, that summer. A major collector of Abstract Expressionism and Color Field painting, Rowan featured Flaming On in an exhibition of his collection in the Spring of 1967, before lending the work to the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s traveling retrospective of Olitski’s recent work in the Summer and Fall of that year. In 1969, the painting was included in New York Painting: 1944-1969, an exhibition curated by Alan Solomon for the Pasadena Art Museum. The painting returned to Vermont in 1985, when Rowan donated it to Bennington College.