Color It Color

Nudes also interest Abstractionist Jules Olitski but mainly as an excuse to keep his draftsmanship in shape. Ever so often, a nude model poses for him while he, Critic Clement Greenberg and a couple of friends sketch from life. When Olitski settles down to serious painting, he turns out tinted canvases whose miragelike effects derive from the absence, indeed the positive negation, of the penciled line in any shape or form (see opposite)

"I want the logic of color," says the artist, "to be the structure of my paintings, to open them up, to make them expand and breathe. I want my paintings to come out of color and not drawing. I just roll out the canvas and begin and let it grow." Lately, Olitski has been rolling out a lot of canvas. He is preparing for three one-man shows, to be held this summer and fall in London, Los Angeles and New York City. In addition, his work will be shown later this month at West Germany's prestigious Dokumenta, and he can hardly meet the demand from private buyers, who willingly pay from $4,000 to $12,000 for a painting. Among today's so-called color-field painters, Olitski is ranked by many on a par with Kenneth Noland and the late Morris Louis. While the canvases of both Louis and Noland are generally filled with several areas of color that rest flatly on the canvas, Olitski has mastered the art of spraying on paint to create a single, subtly shaded veil that conveys an illusion of depth. It is a painstaking process; on a single painting he may use as many as ten different spray guns, apply dozens of different coats. When completed, the painting gives a viewer the sensation of gazing into a shimmering, bottomless sea. To dramatize the effect, Olitski often moors his canvas to earth with emphatic narrow bands of paint along the edges, which form a frame within a frame.

The Russian-born, Brooklyn-raised painter has been enamored of abstraction ever since his G.I. bill studies in Paris. When he first attracted national attention in 1961 by winning an award at Pittsburgh's International Exhibition, his prize painting consisted of two painted blobs of blue, divided by a yellow arc. In late 1963, he took to spreading paint over an entire canvas with a roller, subsequently progressed to sprays and to bounding his spray paintings with a painted streak. Lately he has been going back to his earlier canvases and changing them or adding that all-important final boundary of paint.

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