Paul Jenkins
Untitled
1972

Name: Untitled
Brand: Paul Jenkins
Price: 32000 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

Paul Jenkins Untitled, 1972 features a multilayered fusion of paints that blend together utilizing a unique darkened color palette to create a mystical and compelling image. A black stream of paint emerges from the right edge to sweep across the paper, widening and becoming increasingly transparent as it progresses to the left edge to reveal hints of other colors underneath. Jenkins’ unorthodox method of thinning and guiding the paint across the surface of the paper, without using a brush, allows for this transparency to create multilayered images. Red, orange and teal brighten either side of the black and tastefully blend together, forming undulating horizontal stripes of color. Jenkins uses the absence of color, leaving small areas of white on the edges to contrast with the central composition, which is dominated by heavy, saturated colors. The refined manner in which the colors bleed and transmute together offer several interpretations and degrees of complexity that reflect the intricacy of human emotions. Through an artistic lens, Jenkins explores mysticism and its relationship to spirituality, a quintessential component to his abstract and expressive style. Created in 1972, Paul Jenkins Untitled is a unique and original watercolor on paper. This work is hand-signed and dated by Paul Jenkins (Kansas City 1923 – New York 2012) in pencil on verso. About the Framing: Framed to museum-grade, conservation standards, Paul Jenkins Untitled, 1972 is presented in a complementary moulding and optical grade Plexiglas.

Creator:

Paul Jenkins (1923 - 2012, American)

Creation Year:

1972

Dimensions:

Height: 41.5 in (105.41 cm)Width: 98.5 in (250.19 cm)

Medium:

Paper,Watercolor

Movement & Style:

Abstract Expressionist

Period:

1970-1979

Condition:

Gallery Location:

Palo Alto, CA

Reference Number:

Seller: 64291stDibs: LU1567210764182

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Paul Jenkins

Born in Kansas City, the multimedia artist, poet and playwright Paul Jenkins began his studies at Kansas City Art Institute and the Art Students League in New York City. After his discharge from military service at the end of February 1946, he briefly studied playwriting with dramatist George McCalmon at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh. Thereafter, Jenkins spent four years studying with Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi in New York City. His first solo exhibitions were held at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris in 1954 and the Martha Graham Gallery in New York City in 1956. Over the past 30 years, numerous retrospectives have been curated across the globe and Jenkins’s work can be found in national collections from Europe and the United States to Israel, Australia and Japan.

The diversity of Jenkins’s work springs from a wealth of eclectic influences. Some of his earliest works included what he called "interior landscapes” influenced by ancient natural forms. Frequent student visits to the Frick Collection in New York fostered a love of the great masters, while trips to the renowned Eastern collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City evoked powerful responses to a monumental Chinese fresco of Buddha, polychrome sculptures of the enlightened Bodhisattva, the Buddhist goddess of mercy Kuan-Yin, Indian bronzes of Hindu god Shiva and statues of meditative Buddhist lohans. Serving in the US Naval Air Corps during the Second World War, Jenkins painted watercolours of Japanese Kabuki dancers and read the ancient Chinese poetic teachings of the I Ching and Lao Tse Tung’s Tao Te Ching, described by him as "masterpieces in simplicity.” Jenkins’s discovery of psychoanalyst Carl Jung’s book Psychology and Alchemy was as illuminating for his practice as were formative meetings with dancer Martha Graham, architect Frank Lloyd Wright and Abstract Expressionist painters Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.

Concerned with colour and texture, nearness and distance as well as reality and mysticism, Jenkins’s work — considered to be part of the second wave of Abstract Expressionism — is a spiritual meditation on the nature of chance, balance, synchronicity, change and transformation. His ejection from an early art class in Kansas City for eating the still life appears instructive: "For me the pear is to be eaten and experienced, not painted.” Jenkins sought to reject the traditional Neo-Platonic approach to art as well as life in favour of a Taoist concern for the “present moment.” In this sense his paintings become spiritual reflections on the transitory present, life merely a rippled dance upon the water’s surface. Jenkins’s death in 2012 and the subsequent release of important works onto the market by his estate increased global interest in his work and they have grown in value and popularity. Jenkins’s works can be found in public and private collections worldwide.

(Biography provided by Stern Pissarro Gallery)