Ilya Bolotowsky

Column

circa 1970

Ilya Bolotowsky grew up in Russia and enjoyed drawing, but his family wanted him to do something “socially useful,” so he planned to be a lawyer. He changed his mind after he moved to New York, however, and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. During the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration hired him as a mural painter, and he was one of the first artists to create completely abstract designs for the project. He composed geometric images from colored rectangles and squares, inspired by his belief in “ideal harmony and order.” From the late 1940s, Bolotowsky used canvases shaped as diamonds, circles, and ovals to show how the edge of the painting could change the visual effect of the lines and angles within. (Bolotowsky, interviewed by Svendsen and Poser, Ilya Bolotowsky, 1974)