Jules Olitski was born Jevel Demikovski in Snovsk, Ukraine. He emigrated to the United States with his widowed mother and grandmother in 1923. In 1926, his mother married Hyman Olitsky. Sometime around World War II, Demikovski officially adapted his stepfather’s name, changing the final letter from “y” to “i.” Olitski attended New York City public schools where he showed an early talent for art. Olitski’s first exposure to real art was at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 where he was impressed by the work of Rembrandt. From 1939 until 1942, Olitski studied painting and drawing at the National Academy of Design, and sculpture at the Beaux Arts Institute, New York, and with Chaim Gross at the Educational Alliance. From 1942 to 1945, Olistski served with the U.S. Armed Forces, becoming a citizen in the process. After World War II, and funded by the G.I. Bill, he traveled to Paris where he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and the Ossip Zadkine School. Olitski had a one-man show in Paris in 1951, the first of what would grow to over one hundred such shows during his lifetime. (For a readily accessible source of information about Olitski, see the website of the Jules Olitski Foundation.)
Olitski earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Art Education from New York University in 1952 and 1954. In 1954–55, he taught at the New York State University at New Paltz, and from 1956 until 1963, at the Fine Arts Division of C. W. Post College, Long Island. In 1959, Olitski had his first one-man show in New York at French and Company. From 1963 to 1967, he taught at Bennington College, Vermont. In 1987 he was the Milton and Sally Avery Visiting Professor of Art at Bard College. In 1966, Olitski was one of four artists chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, in company with Roy Lichtenstein, Helen Frankenthaler, and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1969, he exhibited his aluminum spray-painted sculptures at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, achieving the distinction of being the first living artist to be invited to have a one-person show at that museum. In 1991, Olitski was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The following year he was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design, becoming a full Academician in 1994. Over the course of a long career, Olitski accumulated an impressive list of awards and honors.
Jules Olitski was a major figure in American abstract art in the second half of the twentieth century, working until he died in 2007. As an artist, he remained a restless experimenter and innovator, investigating new technologies and moving freely among a variety of styles Championed by the influential 20th-century art critic Clement Greenberg, Greenberg called him, in 1990, “the best painter alive” (as quoted by Roberta Smith, “The Great Beginning of Jules Olitski,” New York Times, Jan. 28, 2021, Section C, p. 9). In that same review, Smith observed that “Olitski has been ripe for reconsideration for some years.”
