Included in the Abstract Expressionist canon by the critic Clement Greenberg, Dzubas created works in the vein of the Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field painting. He was a pioneer of the stain painting technique, along with Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. While sharing a studio with Frankenthaler in the early 1950s, he produced monumental compositions of flat swaths of bold colors butting up against one another in patterns reminiscent of stacked objects, such as Steppe and Night Mesa. Unlike colleagues who stained their diluted pigments onto raw canvas, Dzubas painted over gesso grounds, scrubbing thick layers of color and creating fields of dense or almost translucent color. For him, these paintings referenced natural phenomena, emotion, the painterly gesture, and the experience of color itself.

Adina Kamien

Included in the Abstract Expressionist canon by the critic Clement Greenberg, Dzubas created works in the vein of the Lyrical Abstraction and Color Field Painting. He was a pioneer of the stain painting technique along with Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and Kenneth Noland. While sharing a studio with Frankenthaler in the early 1950s, he produced monumental compositions of flat swaths of bold colors butting up against one another in patterns reminiscent of stacked objects, such as Steppe and Night Mesa. Unlike colleagues who stained their diluted pigments onto raw canvas, Dzubas painted over gesso grounds, scrubbing thick layers of color and creating fields of dense or almost translucent color. For him, these paintings referenced natural phenomena, emotion, the painterly gesture, and the experience of color itself.

Adina Kamien

Jenkins’s innovative practice was guided by his choice to avoid the paintbrush altogether. Gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color characterize his work from the late 1950s on. Allowing pigment to pool, bloom, or roll across the surface of his canvases, he would guide the paint with a knife to create fluid fields of color. Talking about his process, the artist said: “I do not stain and I do not work on unprimed canvas. This is more significant than it may appear. Staining or working on unprimed canvas results in an inkblot-like effect where the paint penetrates the canvas and spreads out on its own. When I work on primed canvas, I can control the flow of paint and guide it to discover forms. The ivory knife is an essential tool in this because it does not gouge the canvas, it allows me to guide the paint.” And: “With the smooth organic surface of the ivory, I could use great pressure against the sensitive tooth of the canvas.”

Jenkins had a longtime interest in Eastern religions and philosophy. He studied the ancient Chinese divination text I Ching (1000–750 BCE), as well as the writings of psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung. Inward reflection and mysticism dominated his life and aesthetic.

Adina Kamien

Replete with personal memories, Kupferman’s works are characterized by his unique layering technique, in which revealing and concealing are both a method and a result – an artistic device and an end-in-itself. Using this strict, concise technique, the artist repeatedly covers parts of the painting and then uncovers them, as in an archaeological dig. Looking at the many layers of paint applied on the canvas and soaked and smeared into it is somewhat like seeing multiple lenses held on top of each other, or watching a kind of breathing, pulsating body. Sometimes the grid motif is clearly evident in the paintings, like the exposed infrastructure of a building, and at other times the artist admits to struggling with lines and shapes that go against his own rigid rules. This conflict between order and chaos, between straight lines and uncontrollable ones, creates a constant tension between logic and planning on the one hand and spontaneity and freedom on the other.

In his early days in Israel, Kupferman studied with Avigdor Stematsky and Yosef Zaritsky, two of the founding fathers of the New Horizons movement, which was at the forefront of abstract painting in Israel in the 1950s and 1960s. While the works of these painters, even at their most abstract, were based on still lifes or landscapes, Kupferman’s abstract images are not confined to any time or place – although they bear indirect traces of the Holocaust, Israel’s wars, and other traumatic events such as Rabin’s assassination.

Noga Goldstein

Rothko first developed his characteristic compositional strategy in 1947 and spent his career exploring the limitless possibilities of layering variously sized and colored rectangles onto fields of color. Rothko wanted the viewer to stand in close proximity to the painting, to be enveloped in its colors and swept into an emotional and existential state. “I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on,” he declared. “And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions. . . . If you . . . are moved only by their color relationships, then you miss the point.”

His signature works consist of broad rectangular areas of varying number, proportions, and colors, with softened edges, hovering over each other and over the painting’s surface. A chromatic afterimage heightens this sensation, so that staring at each colored segment individually affects the perception of those adjacent to it. In this painting, blue and yellow fields of color are suspended in conflicted unity within a reddish-orange surface. The faint unevenness in color intensity reveals the artist’s exploration of the technique of scumbling: by planting bold colors on top of a haze of translucent layers of paint, he created ambiguity and gentle movement as blocks emerge and recede. In Rothko’s words, “either their surfaces are expansive and push outward in all directions, or their surfaces contract and rush inward in all directions. Between these poles you can find everything I want to say.”

Adina Kamien

After a visit to New York in April 1953 where they saw the recent paintings of Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland began to similarly stain raw canvases with diluted pigment, rather than applying it with a brush. Experimenting with different painting techniques and media, compositional formats and canvas sizes, Louis produced an astonishingly large body of work. His paintings are divided into three basic series: the Veils (1954–60), the Unfurleds (summer 1960 – winter 1961), and the Stripes (winter 1961– summer 1962).

Iota is one of about 150 Unfurleds, generally created on mural-size canvases. In all of them, irregular rivulets of bold multicolored pigment flow diagonally down towards the lower center of the canvas, but rarely meet; a large area of raw, unembellished canvas remains at the center. Heavily diluted, the poured colors soak into the canvas, becoming one with the surface and maintaining the flatness of the modern picture plane. Color retains its optical purity and there is no sense of narrative, image, or perspectival space as in traditional painting. Eschewing illusionistic references, the artist forces the viewer to focus solely on the painting’s formal elements – color, size, and shape – and the vibrant, light-filled space they inhabit.

Adina Kamien

In 1952, the artist moved to Washington, where, like his contemporary Kenneth Noland, he set out to deconstruct what constituted a painting’s formal properties. Louis’s inventive painting technique utilizes vertical stains of color on raw canvas. Untitled belongs to a series of breakthrough paintings the artist made between 1954 and 1960, known as Veils because of the translucent layers and billowing shapes of their aqueous pools of color. Relinquishing the brush entirely, Louis poured thinned acrylic paint onto one edge of a large canvas pinned to a horizontal stretcher, and then tilted the stretcher so that the paint ran across the canvas, sometimes straight, sometimes in a gentle curve. The flow was determined by gravity or by the artist’s manipulation of the canvas as the paint spread. Successive bands unfold, creating rich, luminous veils of color. The first layers of color are usually bright, and additional layers of black or brown often dull their hues. Along the top of the canvas, vibrant stains of orange and yellow reveal themselves as the veils of paint appear to float in space.

Adina Kamien

Olitski focused on the material qualities of surface and edge, color and line. In 1960, he began to pour and stain dye onto enormous rolls of raw canvas unfurled across the studio floor. He experimented with different methods of applying paint, using brushes, sponges, mops, and rollers. In 1964 he said to sculptor Anthony Caro: “What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of color that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape.” Caro, who was painting his sculptures with a spray gun, suggested that Olitski try this technique – also used by car customizers – and as a result Olitski developed his method of spraying paint with an industrial spray gun onto unprimed canvas. This technique allowed him to paint large surfaces rapidly, creating the sought-after effects of hazy color suspended midair. In his statement for the 1966 Venice Biennale, Olitski wrote: “When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color . . . appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface.”

Working initially with three spray guns simultaneously to create different densities of color, Olitski later used a single spray gun with a variety of nozzles for more control. The spray gun, containing emulsion paint thickened with an acrylic gel for greater viscosity, produced a mosaic-like effect on the unprimed surface. He laid and tacked the canvas to the floor before applying the paint to the entire surface, subsequently dividing it into a series of separate paintings. From 1966, Olitski placed greater emphasis on the framing edge. For closure, he created linear borders along the bottom and side edges with brushstrokes of gel-thickened paint applied beneath and on top of the sprayed coat. Colored lines, harmonizing with the sprayed colors, define the edge of what otherwise appears as a film of delicate, tonally related colors. Each work was attached to a stretcher after completion of the painting.

Adina Kamien

Olitski focused on the material qualities of surface and edge, color and line. In 1960, he began to pour and stain dye onto enormous rolls of raw canvas unfurled across the studio floor. He experimented with different methods of applying paint, using brushes, sponges, mops, and rollers. In 1964 he said to sculptor Anthony Caro: “What I would like in my painting is simply a spray of color that hangs like a cloud, but does not lose its shape.” Caro, who was painting his sculptures with a spray gun, suggested that Olitski try this technique – also used by car customizers – and as a result Olitski developed his method of spraying paint with an industrial spray gun onto unprimed canvas. This technique allowed him to paint large surfaces rapidly, creating the sought-after effects of hazy color suspended midair. In his statement for the 1966 Venice Biennale, Olitski wrote: “When the conception of internal form is governed by edge, color . . . appears to remain on or above the surface. I think, on the contrary, of color as being seen in and throughout, not solely on, the surface.”

Working initially with three spray guns simultaneously to create different densities of color, Olitski later used a single spray gun with a variety of nozzles for more control. The spray gun, containing emulsion paint thickened with an acrylic gel for greater viscosity, produced a mosaic-like effect on the unprimed surface. He laid and tacked the canvas to the floor before applying the paint to the entire surface, subsequently dividing it into a series of separate paintings. From 1966, Olitski placed greater emphasis on the framing edge. For closure, he created linear borders along the bottom and side edges with brushstrokes of gel-thickened paint applied beneath and on top of the sprayed coat. Colored lines, harmonizing with the sprayed colors, define the edge of what otherwise appears as a film of delicate, tonally related colors. Each work was attached to a stretcher after completion of the painting.

Adina Kamien

According to Hartung, “the painting which is called abstract is none of the ‘Isms’ of which there have been so many lately, it is neither a ‘style’ nor an ‘epoch’ in art history, but merely a new means of expression, a different human language – one which is more direct than that of earlier painting.” His abstractions exhibit distinctive swirls, scribbles, and hatch marks made by scratching, erasing, and reapplying pigment. Composition features three black suspended areas of color hovering over a yellowish and gray background. In several locations, calligraphic scratches reveal the bare canvas below, creating a tension between them and the areas of color. The work appears to embody and celebrate a central idea in Hartung’s thought: “The first and most important thing is to remain free, free in each line you undertake, in your ideas and in your political action, in your moral conduct . . . The artist especially must remain free from all outer restraints.”

Adina Kamien