Paul Jenkins

(1923-2012)

Paul Jenkins is an American artist born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri. He first studied at the Kansas Art Institute (1937-1942). He then won a scholarship to the Cleveland Play House, a theater school where he focused on set design. World War II interrupted his training. In 1943, he was drafted into the US Naval Air Corps, where he served until 1945. He moved to New York in 1948. He studied at the Art Students League, a famous institution attended by Alexander Calder, Jackson Pollock and Roy Lichtenstein, among other artists. In New York, Jenkins rubbed shoulders with Mark Rothko, with whom he was to become very close, and who played a major role in the non-figurative orientation of his work. In New York, "Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell. We all hung out together. [1]" At the same time, Jenkins became interested in Eastern philosophies and occultism, another decisive encounter. In this respect, Georges Gurdjieff's work has had a profound influence on Jenkins' work, beyond the fad he became the subject of in the 1950s.

In the early 1950s, thanks to the G.I. Bill (Servicemen's Readjustment Act), Paul Jenkins traveled to Europe. He settled in Paris in 1953, where he familiarized himself with European painting. He was strongly influenced by the work of Gustave Moreau, Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Henri Matisse and Wassily Kandinsky. "The way each painter conceives and renders light is an indecipherable mystery that remains the inexplicable secret of the artist", he confided to Philippe Bouchet.[2]. The contemporary Parisian art scene is dominated by the abstraction of informal art. In Paris, Jenkins met Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages, as well as American artists living in Paris at the time, notably Sam Francis. From then on, he lived between Paris and New York. From the mid-1950s onwards, he exhibited at the Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris, the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle and the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. In 1956, with his first wife Esther Jenkins, he published Observations of Michel Tapié.

His work essentially revolves around the color light. The prism is of major interest to him. "That light creates color is an enduringly fascinating subject. [3]"He was interested in the theories of color that flourished in the ^19th century. His study of Johann Wolfgang Goethe's Treatise on Color, published in 1810, led to the creation of the Phenomena series in 1960. Phenomena are executed without a brush. The artist pours liquid pigments directly onto the canvas, which he orients as he sees fit to direct the flow and distribution of color. He also uses an ivory knife for this purpose. Jenkins was not the only painter at the time to paint without a brush; think of Jackson Pollock's drippings, Morris Louis' "coulures" and Yves Klein's anthropometries of the late 1950s. "Centered around the prism as an operative central core", the Phenomena "reveal, in the undulating folds of their vivid colors, the entire history of the event they constitute. [4] " Jenkins travels to Japan, where he works with the Gutai group. He also traveled to India, always keen on oriental mysticism.

A monograph of his work was published in 1973 by Albert Elsen with the renowned publisher Harry N. Abrams, New York. Abrams also published the artist's autobiography, Anatomy of a Cloud, in 1983.

In 1976, Jenkins turned his attention to Newton's prism and worked on the effects of transparency and opacity in color. Over the next decade, in parallel with "coulure" painting, he turned to impasto. Color became more distinct. It gains in intensity. For Jenkins, these are two ways of bringing out the future of the work.

In 1987, his choreographic piece Prisme du Chaman, for which he also designed the sets and costumes, was presented at the Paris Opera.

He died in New York in 2012.

Paul Jenkins has a substantial lithographic body of work. In the 1960s, he frequented Fernand Mourlot's famous studio. In 1967, at the invitation of the Atelier Mourlot, he created a poster to celebrate the opening of a new branch in New York (115 Bank Street), following in the footsteps of other artists such as Calder. From 1987 onwards, he worked as a lithographer at the Bordas studio. There, with André Verdet, he designed the entirely lithographed book Euphories de la couleur (1988) and the series Sept aspects d'Amadeus et les autres (1992), comprising over fifty lithographs.

[1] Interview with Philippe Bouchet, in Régis Dorval (ed.), Paul Jenkins: œuvres majeures, cat. exp., Lille, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 2005, reprinted in Paul Jenkins, Paris, Galerie Diane de Polignac, 2014.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Restany, "Paul Jenkins. La Couleur, la lumière et le Chamane", Cimaise n°190, September-October 1987.