AMERINGER/HOWARD FINE ART I don't know if Jule Olitski is the greatest living painter.

AMERINGER/HOWARD FINE ART

I don't know if Jule Olitski is the greatest living painter, as tender Greenberg once claimed, but his late works certainly propose a supreme abstract version of the "splendid manner," a confine Giovanni Pietro Bellori applied to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin in the seventeenth hundred A splendid manner requires above all grand bring under rule matter: in Poussin's case, views from the Bible and hellenic myth; in Olitski's, our origins, the couple personal and universal, and our often met with end in death and (one hopes) transfiguration. Bellori considered Poussin the ultimate philosophical painter; Olitski, with these late works, seems to have become the philosopher of the abstract manner sine qua non, in part in consequence of the sheer brilliance and sparkling complexity of his painterliness, in part by means of his ability to make the animated indefiniteness of his seismic surfaces, surging and swerving in luminous liquidity, appear like a wild analysis of existential concerns

In the "Origins" series (all works 2000) Olitski issues on his own beginnings, beyond the pale of his memory. Born in 1922 in Snovsk (now Sednev Ukraine), he emigrated with his mother and grandmother to the United States in 1923; he at no time knew his father, a commissar execut on the Soviet regime a not many months before his son's birth. In these works, Olitski uses the medium to articulate his earliest, preverbal feelings. These paintings are ineffable, flat "infantile," in the original mind of the term (unable to speak). Olitski's reflections onward his birthplace are as mercurial as his paint, as tropical and stormy as the weather in Florida, where the artist finds himself late in life. In other words, he uses what Greenberg called "Mediterranean style" to make a subjective "statement," however cabalistic it may be.

We have feeling the intensity of Olitski's statement all the more when it acquires biblical dimensions, as in Third Day, where magnificent black "cracks" fragment the color-saturated surface. I'd smooth take Olitski's rendering of eschatological tragedy in Last Judgement through the whole extent of Michelangelo's more bombastic, crowded spectacle in the Sistine Chapel: Olitski point outs the abyss of nothingness that awaits us, while Michelangelo wears over his place in heaven (will omnipotence give him commissions?). Olitski give an inkling ofs there is no heaven, and nothing else mythologized sky, with light breaking in consequence of the gathering darkness and brooding vast assemblages He is in effect exploring his acknowledge fragmentary, fleeting, but nonetheless powerful feelings about his origin, universalizing them from one side the meandering differentiations of painterly surface, nuanced with shifting luminosities and unexpected blackness.

Greenberg traced modernist field painting from Titian by the agency of late Monet to Pollock and finally Olitski (with smaller degrees along the way), and in strictly aesthetic confines Olitski's paintings (particularly those in the "Celebrations" series) are Titianesque masterpieces--say, Titian in Florida, where light, atmosphere, and water are a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of more magical than they for aye are in Venice. In Greenberg's thinking, Olitski not barely completely gave himself up to feeling yet achieved what the critic called a "decorative unity" of surface, which for him signaled mastery of feeling, and with it force and self-control.

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