Jevel Demikovski, known professionally as Jules Olitski, was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor.
16 Facts About Jules Olitski
1.
2.
Jules Olitski emigrated to the United States in 1923 with his mother and grandmother and settled in Brooklyn.
3.
Jules Olitski's grandmother cared for him while his mother worked to support the family.
4.
Jules Olitski showed an aptitude for drawing and by 1935 was taking occasional art classes in Manhattan.
5.
Jules Olitski attended public schools in New York, winning an art prize upon his graduation from high school.
6.
Jules Olitski presented his first one-man show in Paris in 1951.
7.
Jules Olitski had his first one-person show at Galerie Huit, Paris in 1951.
8.
Jules Olitski returned to New York, and reacting against the color and imagery of his Paris works, began to paint monochromatic pictures with empty centers.
9.
In 1960 Jules Olitski abruptly moved away from the heavily encrusted abstract surfaces he had evolved and began to stain the canvas with large areas of thin, brightly colored dyes.
10.
Jules Olitski's style "combined the titanic reverb of Mark Rothko with the mischievous optical winks Wassily Kandinsky made famous".
11.
Jules Olitski exhibited internationally in the late 1960s and was selected as one of four artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1966.
12.
Jules Olitski taught at Bennington College from 1963 to 1967.
13.
Jules Olitski had over 150 one-person exhibitions in his lifetime and is represented in museums worldwide.
14.
Jules Olitski received honorary doctorates from the University of Hartford, Keene State College, and Southern New Hampshire University.
15.
In 2024, Jules Olitski's work was included in Every Sound Is a Shape of Time: Selections from PAMM's Collection at the Perez Art Museum Miami, alongside modern and contemporary artists Mark Bradford, Helen Frankenthaler, Richard Serra, and Louis Morris, among others.
16.
Jules Olitski lived and worked in studios in New Hampshire and Florida and exhibited regularly until his death from cancer in 2007, aged 84.