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Gallery showing work of American abstract expressionist Paul Jenkins
Paul Jenkins, Phenomena Lasting Dawn, 1977.
Work by American abstract expressionist Paul Jenkins is on exhibit in the UB Anderson Gallery through Aug. 22.
The exhibition, “Paul Jenkins in the 1960s and 1970s: Space, Color and Light,” is free and open to the public, and is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with an essay by Sandra H. Olsen, director of the UB Art Galleries. The gallery, at One Martha Jackson Place, off Englewood Avenue between Main Street and Kenmore Avenue, is open from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday, and from 1-5 p.m. on Sunday. For information, call 829-3754.
Jenkins’ work came to represent the spirit, vitality and invention of post-World War II American abstraction. He is known for his process of controlled paint pouring, with which he produced brilliant, fluid, jewel-like veils of transparent and translucent color.
The Jenkins exhibition runs concurrently with a second Anderson Gallery exhibition, “Under Each Other’s Spell”: Gutai and New York,” featuring work by the Gutai Group from Jenkins’ collection.
The influential group, with whom Jenkins worked in 1964, was founded in 1954 in Osaka, Japan, by Jiro Yoshihara, who defined “gutai” as truth to the material of which art is made and lifting that material to spiritual heights, something Jenkins certainly did with his preferred medium.
“Jenkins sought to sustain translucency and increase density in his color overlays by exploiting the unique properties of the then-new water-based acrylic in 1960,” Olsen says, “and it became his preferred medium for painting on canvas.”
She points out that, in reviewing Jenkins’ 1971-72 retrospective exhibition in Houston and San Francisco, art critic Alfred Frankenstein called him “one of those selected by fate to come into their own with the introduction of the acrylic medium. His mature work is inconceivable except in terms of acrylic, with its fluidity, its acquiescence in unconventional techniques and its special range of luminosity in color.”
Contributing to the luminosity of his paintings, Olsen says, is the fact that Jenkins primes his canvases, which allows the poured pigments to pool and flow on the surface, rather than soak into it.
Jenkins’ work has been shown consistently in New York and international venues since the 1950s, but many of the paintings in this UB exhibit had not been seen since their debuts until they were exhibited last year in New York City.
For four years, Jenkins was a student of Japanese American painter, photographer and printmaker Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League (NYC), and during those years was drawn to painters Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, whom he came to know. He was also soon drawn to the works of Mark Tobey, and he met the artist in Paris in 1954.
His longstanding interest in Eastern religions and philosophy dates to his early years in Kansas City, Mo., where he frequented the renowned Asian collection at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. This, and his interest in Jung, prompted an inward, reflective turn in Jenkins, which, along with mysticism, ultimately dominated his aesthetic and his life.
He developed many tools and approaches to paint application and, in 1958, began to guide the flow of the paint with an ivory knife, from which came the title of an award-winning documentary film (“The Ivory Knife”) about Jenkins and his process, produced by Red Parrot Films, Martha Jackson Gallery.
Jackson, founder of the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City, was a passionate collector and champion of abstract expressionism. She met Jenkins in Paris in 1954 and organized his first solo exhibition in New York in 1956. Thus began a long relationship with her gallery that lasted beyond her death in 1969.
Jackson was the mother of David Anderson, founder of the UB Anderson Gallery, which holds the archives of the Martha Jackson and David Anderson galleries.
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