Color in the Mist

There is hardly a living American abstractionist more laden with praise than that master of the peachy void, Jules Olitski. To call him the most suave and accomplished of color-field painters is one thing. But to claim him as a hero of history is weirdly premature. In a catalogue introduction to the Olitski retrospective that he organized for Boston's Museum of Fine Arts (it is currently on view at the Albright-Knox Museum in Buffalo), Curator Kenworth Moffett pronounced that "Olitski is ... saving the easel painting itself as a viable modernist idiom." No less.

Yet for all the excess of such encomiums, Olitski -a husky, affable, blunt-headed Russian who was born in Snovsk in 1922 and emigrated to New York with his mother the next year -is a force to be reckoned with. He has next to no public face, for he prefers the quiet of a huge loft-studio on lower Broadway -out of which comes an undistracted flow of work. But his reputation is that of an artist who, more clearly than anyone else of his generation except the late Morris Louis, isolated and developed pure color as the hub, the very subject, of painting.

Olitski was not always a colorist. The earliest works in the show -a group of thick-surfaced, brown-and-white pictures from the late '50s -are weak monochrome transcriptions from the piled-up, earthy pigments of French painters like Dubuffet and Fautrier, whose work he had seen during a sojourn in Paris from 1949 to 1951. But in 1960 Olitski started pouring dye onto large canvases, and the vibrant stains of color that resulted caused a shift in the direction of his style. In retrospect these Olitskis of the early '60s -like Osculum Silence, which won a prize in the Carnegie Institute's painting competition in Pittsburgh, or Chemise -are among the sharpest and most resonant works of his career. With its broad oval swaths of blue, pink and green acrylic, Chemise both hammers the eye with its chromatic intensity and soothes it with the slow coiling of its forms.

But gradually the color took absolute precedence. Olitski recalls a conversation in 1965: "I said I would like my painting to have the appearance of being just color. Then I remarked that if only I could spray some color into the air and somehow it would remain suspended, that's what I would want. Just color by itself. I thought it was amusing, and so did everyone else. But that evening, going to sleep, it occurred to me that it was a serious notion."

Airy and Melting. Hence Olitski's switch to "allover" fields of color that filled his canvas from edge to edge, as in paintings like Doulma (1966). Rolled and sprayed, the beads of paint coalesce in shimmering veils and crusts of color; their cellular clustering compares to the more formal dots of Seurat's pointillisme rather as Pollock's drips and squiggles did to conventional line drawing. Olitski's colors range from the airiest and most melting lavenders, pinks, apricots and pistachio-greens to nocturnal Prussian blues and ultramarines. In fact, the temptation to describe them in terms of candy or decorators' samples is hard to resist. It is prettified to a degree.

Since he began spraying in the mid-'60s, Olitski's images have risen from one -and only one -kind of space: a gauzy recession of thin air, as if seen from the window of a high-flying plane. There is no body, no horizon, no limit except the boundaries of the canvas itself -up to 21 feet wide -and the sole subject is hue. Critics often credit Olitski's pictures with the meditative expansion, the hypnotic and floating silence of Monet's last and greatest cycle of canvases: the enormous lily-pond "decorations" from Giverney. But this is Monet without the water or the lily pads -without, in other words, the sense of a reality constantly in transubstantiation. In Olitski the lack of relationship and incident becomes troublesome, no matter how exquisitely tinted the mist.

Olitski's habit of giving his tremulous spaces a fringe of contrasting color is a way out; it affords some play within the picture -fog versus frame. The decorative effect is often breathtaking, but it nevertheless tends to remain a mechanical expedient, like the composition-bolstering trees that sprouted by rote at the edges of early 19th century academic landscapes. All other forms are volatilized, and by the very fact of this reduction Olitski leaves his color, in effect, without a structure. So despite their imposing size and careful craftsmanship, the recent pictures become curiously monotonous -all nuance and no potatoes. "Robert Hughes

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