For more information or digital images,
contact
Margaret Keough, director of marketing and
communications
Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski on view at
KC’s Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art
Exhibition opens with free, public reception 5:30–7:30 p.m., Friday, May
20.
The exhibition Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski
draws together more than thirty important works from public and private
collections and presents an overview of Jules Olitski’s career in painting. This
is the first retrospective of the artist’s paintings since his death in 2007. On
view May 20–August 21, 2011 at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary
Art, the exhibition then travels in 2012 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
Texas; the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio; and the American University Museum,
Washington, D.C. The exhibition was organized by the Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art and curated by art historians E. A. Carmean Jr., Alison
de
Lima Greene, and Karen Wilkin. Admission to the Kemper Museum is
free.
Jules Olitski (1922–2007) first received international
acclaim as a Color Field painter and continued to experiment with techniques and
processes throughout his career. Together, the exhibition’s works span five
decades of Olitski’s creative output. The exhibition’s curators have organized
the exhibition of groupings of Stain paintings, Spray paintings, Baroque
paintings, High Baroque paintings, and the artist’s Late paintings.
Olitski’s signature Color Field paintings, including the
Kemper Museum’s Prince
Patutszky Pleasures (1962), were created in the late 1950s and
1960s and feature bold colors and flat graphic shapes. This was a pivotal time
for Olitski. He had his first solo exhibition in New York in 1958, and his works
attracted the attention of influential art critic Clement
Greenberg, who championed the artist’s work for decades. In 1963, he began
teaching at Bennington College in Vermont where he became close friends with
fellow Color Field painter Kenneth Noland as well as artists David Smith, Robert
Motherwell, Helen Frankenthaler, and Anthony Caro. The artists often exchanged
ideas and visited each other’s studios and exhibitions.
Later in the 1960s, Olitski
wanted to create a sense of weightless and suspended color. He began using a
spray gun to apply paint to his canvases and created his large-scale Spray
paintings. In 1966, Olitski represented the United States in the 33rd Venice
Biennale along with artists Frankenthaler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Ellsworth
Kelly. Remaining faithful to abstraction throughout his career, Olitski explored
textures with iridescent colors in the 1970s and 1980s and at times used mops,
brooms, and mitts to apply paint. In the last decade of his life, “the artist
expressed an almost unbridled sense of freedom and drama, at once timeless,
lurid, and perhaps even audacious,” notes Kemper Museum Director Rachael
Blackburn Cozad in the exhibition’s catalogue.
Jules Olitski was born in 1922
in the Ukraine as Jevel Demikovsky. It was after he and his family immigrated to
the United States in 1926 and his mother remarried that he changed his name to
Jules Olitsky, which later evolved into Jules Olitski. He served in the U.S.
Army during World War II and then studied art in Paris on the GI Bill between
1949 and 1951 at the Ossip Zadkine School and the Académie de la Grande
Chaumière. Olitski later earned a B.A. and an M.A. in art education from New
York University. After teaching for many years first at C. W. Post College on
Long Island, NY, and then at Bennington College, Olitski devoted himself fully
to painting, printmaking, and sculpture at his studio in Vermont and later in
Bear Island, New Hampshire, and Islamorada, Florida.
In 1967, he was awarded the
Corcoran Gold Medal and William A. Clark Award at the 30th Biennial Exhibition
of Contemporary Painters at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
The Corcoran then organized a major exhibition of his works that also
traveled to the San Francisco Museum of Art, and in 1973, the Museum of Fine
Arts in Boston organized a retrospective that traveled to the
Albright-Knox Gallery of Art in Buffalo, NY, and the Whitney Museum of American
Art in New York, NY. Since then, his works have been included in hundreds of
exhibitions and may be found in collections around the world from New York’s
Metropolitan Museum of Art to Florence’s Uffizi Portrait
Gallery.
A fully illustrated exhibition catalogue accompanies the
exhibition Revelation: Major Paintings by Jules Olitski and includes essays by
E. A. Carmean Jr., independent curator and former curator at the National
Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; Alison de Lima Greene, curator of
contemporary art and special projects at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and
Karen Wilkin, independent curator and regular contributor to the Wall Street
Journal and Art in America; as well as select writings by Olitski. The catalogue
will be available for $40 in May through the Museum Shop at www.kemperart.org.
About the Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art
Kansas City’s renowned free modern and contemporary art
museum, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1994 and draws more than
120,000 visitors each year. The Museum boasts a rapidly growing permanent
collection and in three locations—Kemper Museum, Kemper at the Crossroads, and
Kemper East. Admission is free to all locations.
The Kemper Museum (4420 Warwick Blvd.) is open 10:00
a.m.–4:00 p.m., Tuesday–Thursday; 10:00 a.m.–9:00 p.m.,
Friday–Saturday; and 11:00 a.m.–5:00 p.m., Sunday. Café Sebastienne serves lunch
11:00 a.m.–2:30 p.m., Tuesday–Sunday; and dinner 5:30–9:00 p.m.,
Friday–Saturday. The Museum and Café are closed on Mondays and major holidays.
Kemper at the
Crossroads (33 West 19th Street) is open noon–8:00 p.m., Friday and noon–6:00
p.m. Saturday. Admission is free. The galleries of Kemper East (200 E. 44th
Street) are open 10:00 a.m.–4:00 p.m., Tuesday–Friday.
Thank you
Support for Kemper Museum
exhibitions is generously provided by Missouri Arts Council, a state agency;
Arvin Gottlieb Charitable Foundation, UMB Bank, n.a., Trustee; Francis Family
Foundation; Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts, Commerce Bank, Trustee;
David Woods Kemper Memorial Foundation; William T. Kemper Foundation—Commerce
Bank, Trustee; ArtsKC Fund—Arts Council of Metropolitan Kansas City; DST
Systems, Inc.; and Sosland
Foundation.
Frontier Airlines is the
official airlines of the Kemper Museum.
For more
information about the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, visit www.kemperart.org.
(end)
—
Margaret Keough
Director of
Marketing and Communications
Kemper Museum of
Contemporary Art
Kemper Museum | Kemper at the Crossroads | Kemper
East
mailing
address: 4420 Warwick Boulevard, Kansas City, Missouri 64111
free admission and
parking
