Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins was an American abstract painter who lived between New York and Paris. After studying at the Art Students League, he became part of the Abstract Expressionist movement with Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Paul Jenkins also worked with many French artists, as well as Japanese artists in the Gutai group.

Phenomena July 12 1923, Electric dawn – 2007

Acrylic on canvas
55 x 46 cm / 21.6 x 18.1 in.

Phenomena silent dialogue – 2007

Acrylic on canvas
46 x 38 cm / 18.1 x 14.9 in.

AMERICAN PAINTERS IN PARIS
SOLO SHOW
JANUARY 20 – MARCH 20, 2015

PAUL JENKINS
SOLO SHOW
FEBRUARY 3 – MAY 3, 2014

AMERICAN PAINTERS IN PARIS

Published by the Galerie Diane de Polignac
Exhibition Catalog
English – 40 pages

PAUL JENKINS

Published by the Galerie Diane de Polignac
Exhibition Catalog
French & English – 64 pages

The painter Paul Jenkins’ early life and artistic training

Paul Jenkins was born on 12 July 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, in the United States. Paul Jenkins studied at the Kansas City Art Institute between 1937 and 1942—it was during this period that he worked with the ceramist James Weldon, who would have a great influence on Jenkins’ 1950s paintings. Paul Jenkins developed a passion for theatre, receiving a scholarship to attend the Cleveland Play House theatre school in Ohio, where he designed sets.

Paul Jenkins was then called up and served in the U.S. Naval Air Corps between 1943 and 1945. In 1948, he moved to New York City where he studied at the Art Students League of New York, an art school founded in 1875. It was there that he met the painters Morris Kantor and Mark Rothko. He studied under Yasuo Kuniyoshi, who encouraged him to “delve deeply into colour”. In New York, Paul Jenkins was a regular visitor to the Frick Museum, where he admired the works of Francisco de Goya, Rembrandt, William Turner, Georges de la Tour and Johannes Vermeer, from which he learned about the importance of light.

The painter Paul Jenkins’ first travels to Europe

After graduating in 1953, Paul Jenkins travelled to Italy and Spain using the benefits he received as a result of the G.I. Bill—a scholarship distributed by the U.S. government to encourage cultural exchange between the United States and Europe. Paul Jenkins then moved to Paris, where he met Jean Dubuffet, Georges Mathieu and Pierre Soulages, as well as various American artists living in Paris, including the painters Sam Francis and Lee Krasner, and the sculptor Claire Falkenstein. Paul Jenkins would divide his time between New York and Paris throughout his life. The writer Frank Anderson Trapp observed: “It is extremely interesting to note that Jenkins left the United States for Europe just as New York was being recognised as the leading centre of innovation in the visual arts.”

Working with powdered pigments that gave his oil paintings a glazed effect, Paul Jenkins developed a fascination for the works of Gustave Moreau and Odilon Redon.

In 1954, Paul Jenkins’ first solo exhibition work was held at the Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris, where Paul Jenkins met the gallery owner Martha Jackson and the artist Mark Tobey. In the same year, Jenkins’ works were shown at the Galerie Arnaud in Paris.

The painter Paul Jenkins’ success in the United States

Paul Jenkins’ first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle in 1955. The Seattle Art Museum bought one of his paintings at the event. In the same year, Paul Jenkins exhibited his works in group exhibitions at the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York, as well as at the Galerie Rive Droite, the Galerie Jean Lacarde and the Petit Palais in Paris. The next year was marked by the acquisition of one of Paul Jenkins’ works by the collector John I. H. Baur for the Whitney Museum of American Art and Jenkins’ participation in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1957, Peggy Guggenheim bought an oil on canvas by Paul Jenkins from the Stadler Gallery in Paris and donated it to the New Orleans Museum of Art.

Living in New York in 1958, the painter began work on his Eyes of the Dove series and participated in a group exhibition at the Carnegie Institute’s Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

Paul Jenkins’ Phenomena period

After studying Goethe’s theories on colour, Paul Jenkins began work on his Phenomena series in 1960: diluting oil paint to achieve watercolour-style effects, he spread the paint over the surface of the canvas with an ivory knife. Discussing these works, Paul Jenkins said: “Have you ever seen a shark’s fin cutting through the surface of the water? It is very pretty. Beauty harbours latent violence…” Paul Jenkins began using acrylic paint as soon as it became available in the United States in the early 1960s. Describing Paul Jenkins’ approach to work—constantly inventing new techniques—the poet Alain Bosquet said: “The most original [technique] involved pouring the colours into the hollow of a sheet or canvas that he had curved. The sheet was then tilted (…) and lightly folded or unfolded, to force the colours to gather (…) and thus to find their shape. The choreography [of the work] is thus intensified by the movement of the painter.”

In 1961, the Karl Flinker Gallery presented a solo exhibition of Paul Jenkins’ works. In the same year, the publisher Editions Two Cities in Paris published the book The Paintings of Paul Jenkins, which contained texts by Kenneth B. Sawyer, James Fitzsimmons and Pierre Restany. Discussing the painter, the latter said: “Jenkins’ chromatic register disregards all visual constraints: his palette ventures far beyond the conventional limits at the upper end of the spectrum.”

Paul Jenkins met Henri Michaux in 1962—the same year that his works were presented in group exhibitions at the Louvre Museum, the Musée d’Art moderne de Paris and the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, as well as at the Whitney Museum in New York and the Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, in the United States. The following year works by Paul Jenkins were shown in group exhibitions at the Art Institute in Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

In 1964, a Paul Jenkins retrospective was held at the Kestner-Gesellschaft in Hanover. The Martha Jackson Gallery produced the film The Ivory Knife: Paul Jenkins at Work, which was shown in 1966 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Venice Festival, where it received the Golden Eagle Award.

Paul Jenkins travelled to Japan—where he worked with the Gutai group and exhibited works at the Tokyo Gallery—as well as India and Russia.

In 1967, Paul Jenkins received an award for painting at the 30^th Biennale of the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington. His play Strike the Puma, which was published the previous year, appeared on stage in New York. Paul Jenkins’ wife Suzanne Donnelly-Jenkins—who co-wrote with Paul Jenkins—explained that the play hoped “to retrace, in the form of a dance drama, the passage of colour through a prism”.

In 1968, Paul Jenkins produced a series of unique glass sculptures in Venice with the glassmaker Egidio Costantini—whom he knew through Mark Tobey.

Two retrospective exhibitions of Paul Jenkins’ work were presented in 1971: at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the San Francisco Museum of Art. Around the same time, a monumental sculpture by Paul Jenkins entered the collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York.

The monograph Paul Jenkins was published in 1973 by Harry N. Abrams in New York. The artist made his first designs for the Mandala Meditation Sundial, a bronze sculpture project that was completed four years later by the Tallix Foundry in New York.

Paul Jenkins’ Prismes period

Paul Jenkins began studying Newton’s prism in 1976, exploring the effects of transparency and opacity. In the following year, Paul Mazursky shot An Unmarried Woman in Jenkins’ studio in New York. The artist was working on a series of autobiographical collages at the time. The Anatomy of a Cloud series, which featured collages, paintings and sculptures, was exhibited at the Gimpel Weitzenhoffer Gallery in New York in 1978.

During an extended trip to the Caribbean in 1979, Paul Jenkins experimented with more thickly painted works. The painter began employing an impasto technique, laying colours on the canvas in thick layers and then etching into the paint to reveal the colours layered underneath. Known for regularly reinventing his techniques, Paul Jenkins noted that: “It’s not the technique that matters. Technique is only the grammar of intention, thoughts and ideas (…) But first there is sensation, both perceptive and receptive. And with sensation comes the experience of discovering and knowing what one does not have time to explain in the moment.”

A retrospective of Paul Jenkins’ work was held at the Palm Springs Desert Museum in 1981. A piece by Paul Jenkins was acquired by the Fonds National d’Art Contemporain, a public collection under the management of the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. In 1983, the artist was made a Commander of the French Order of Arts and Letters for services to French art. His autobiography, entitled Anatomy of a Cloud, was published by Harry N. Abrams in New York and Paul Jenkins received a medal from the Art Directors Club.

In 1986, Paul Jenkins wrote a choreographic piece, Shaman to the Prism Seen, which was performed the following year at the Paris Opera. Paul Jenkins created canvases, sets and costumes for the production.
A retrospective exhibition was presented at the Musée Picasso in Antibes in the same year. Paul Jenkins created set decorations in silk for a production at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. He also painted six 18 x 5 m banners, a 20 x 25 m canvas, and a series of 10 x 1 m banners for the Great Wall of China in 1988.

The Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille held a retrospective exhibition of Paul Jenkins’ work in 2005. Jenkins’ works also featured in the exhibition Under Each Other’s Spell: Gutai and New York at the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center in Springs, New York, in 2009. Solo exhibitions were presented at the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento in 2010 and at the Museo di Pittura Murale in Prato (Italy) in 2014.

Paul Jenkins passed away in New York in 2012. His archives, including many photographs taken by his wife, were transferred to the American Art Archives at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., in 2010—the archives contained more than 6,000 pieces.

© Diane de Polignac Gallery
Translation: Lucy Johnston

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