The question of taste dogged Jules Olitski’s reception virtually from the start. Early in the 1960s, his most steadfast critical champions, Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, felt compelled to account for it, with Greenberg observing “the shocked distaste” that Olitski’s work elicited, and Fried noting the artist’s tendency to employ “combinations of colors which at first sight appear vulgar, over pretty, or garishly sentimental.” Both critics accounted for this issue by noting Olitski’s willingness to risk ugliness in pursuit of beauty. (Fried: “Nothing prompts the accusation of tastelessness faster than taste used creatively.”) As the decade wore on, it became increasingly clear that the mischievous Olitski not only enjoyed skirting the limits of acceptable taste, but positively relished engaging with “bad” taste. It is not surprising, then, that the 1980s—“the era of excess”—saw Olitski working first with metallic colors, then tinted and mirrored Plexiglas, and finally, in the Mitt paintings which are now on view at Yares Art, masses of acrylic gel mixed with newly-developed “interference” pigments.
The Mitt Paintings is Yares’s third and most concentrated presentation of work by Jules Olitski, focusing on the years between 1988 and 1993. Opulent and luxurious, the Mitt paintings (so named for the housepainter’s mittens used to create them) are works of baroque exuberance, with inches-thick acrylic crests and troughs that belie their unique illusionistic effects. Olitski finished many of the paintings with fine mists of sprayed color applied at an oblique angle so that his scalloping gesture appears to materialize from within the surface. Clouds of black spray curl into the ridges of Ark Dancer (1990), casting one side of the relief-like texture in shadow while amplifying the glossy reflectivity of the other side. The play of light and shade is fundamental to these paintings. The interference pigments Olitski employed in the works, translucent when viewed head on, capture light and reflect color when viewed at different angles. Color quite literally invisible from one perspective appears radiant from another.
There are several family resemblances among the twenty paintings in the exhibition: sharp prismatic color, metallic sheen, and gestures that sprawl from the corners of the canvas and press toward the center. Variations of palette and facture among the works read like differences in emotional valence and atmosphere. Two of the most successful paintings in the show, however, are (relative) outliers. The autumnal Bestowal of the Adjuster (1989) is finished with a yellow-green spray that mutes the picture’s louder extremes of color, draws out an overall warmth, and softens the sense of materiality. Altars of Gold (1991), a dark, moody, nocturnal painting, appears dense and heavy to the eye, its surface spattered and pulverized, with masses of acrylic medium spilling over the bottom edge of the painting’s gold border like a trompe l'oeil effect.
Olitski’s critical reputation has never been as secure as his Color Field colleagues Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler. One of the main contributing factors here is the eclecticism of his art, which precludes easy categorization. Olitski’s paintings of the 1960s, with their stains and sprays of candy-colored hues gave way in the 1970s to neutral-toned slabs of painterly texture, and not long after the Mitt paintings, he embarked on a long period of landscapes and seascapes in pastel. Olitski had no signature style. Both his eclecticism and his risky excursions into the margins of taste recall another artist whose appreciation came belatedly: Hans Hofmann. More particularly, the exaggerated materiality of the Mitt paintings, their simmering color temperatures (even among cool hues, as in Zeus Code[1990]), and the exuberant mood that pervades them, all link these works to the late Hofmann.
T. J. Clark’s characterization of Hofmann in his 1994 essay “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism”—as an artist whose lavish and bombastic paintings, expressive of a petit bourgeois sensibility, trafficked knowingly and unironically in questionable taste—serves just as well as a description of Olitski. It is likely that Greenberg, who did not write about the Mitt paintings but did proclaim Olitski “the greatest painter alive” at exactly the time they were being created, recognized the aggressive materiality of these works as a “homeopathic” critique of the excesses of the culture at large, echoing his earlier assessment of Jackson Pollock. And Sidney Tillim, in a 1989 Arts magazine article, recognized the “profound similarity” of Olitski’s Mitt paintings to Jeff Koons’s gilded Michael Jackson and Bubbles(1988), seeing in both artists an attempt to shock viewers out of the complacency of their taste. To the extent that Olitski’s paintings remain potent in their ability to surprise and disturb, it is due to those aspects that appear most unrestrained and extravagant, and to the persuasiveness with which he utilized them in the creation of his art.