ARTIST JULES OLITSKI (1922–2007)

Jules Olitski, a painter and sculptor who became a widely admired and controversial member of the second generation of American abstract artists, died Sunday in New York, reports the New York Times‘ Benjamin Genocchio. He was eighty-four. Olitski was born Jevel Demikovsky in Ukraine a few months after his father was executed by the Bolsheviks on political charges. The boy escaped with his mother and grandmother to the United States in 1923 and grew up in New York. Olitski was a prolific artist, holding more than 150 one-man exhibitions worldwide. The formalist critics Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried championed his work, and in 1969 he became only the third living artist to have a one-man show at the Metropolitan in New York. As late as 1990, Greenberg described Olitski as “the best painter alive.” His paintings are in many museums, including the Met, the Guggenheim, and MoMA in New York.