Attributed to Jules Olitski, private collection, no coa medium: oil measurements:24"hX36"w no frame, mint condition Biography: Jevel Demikovski, known professionally as Jules Olitski, was an American painter, printmaker, and sculptor. Olitski showed an aptitude for drawing and by 1935 was taking occasional art classes in Manhattan. He attended public schools in New York, winning an art prize upon his graduation from high school. At an exhibit of the work of some of the great masters at the New York World's Fair in 1939 he was very impressed by Rembrandt's portraits. Subsequently he won a scholarship to study art at Pratt Institute and was admitted to the National Academy of Design in New York. His education continued at Beaux Arts Institute in New York from 1940-42. By 1965 Olitski had evolved a radically innovative technique of laying down atmospheric blankets of colored spray on the canvas, marked at first by barely discernible straight-edged value changes near the edge of the picture and later by acrylic paint dragged along portions of the edge. He exhibited internationally in the late 1960s and was selected as one of four artists to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1966. In 1969 he was invited to exhibit large, aluminum, spray-painted sculptures at the Metropolitan Museum of Art becoming the first living American artist to be given a one-person exhibition there.In the 1970s Olitski returned to the thick impasto surfaces which characterized his work in the 50s but with innovative techniques that took advantage of the newly improved polymer and gel acrylic mediums. In 1994 he was elected into the National Academy of Design.His late works from 2001 through January 2007 are characterized by intensely colored orbs that can evoke landscape or skyscape. As Norman L. Kleeblat states in his essay in the catalog that accompanies the exhibition Jules Olitski-The Late Paintings-A Celebration, at Knoedler and Company Nov 2007-Jan 2008. "The intensity of Olitski's colors can feel jarring when each colored area is observed separately. But the artist is a master of unlikely clashes of intense and artificial-looking colors recalling Delacroix.".