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Untitled
1971
Original lithograph in colors
Hand-signed, dated, and designated "Trial Proof" in pencil
26 ½ x 20 in. (67.3 x 50.8 cm), unframed
A unique, authorized proof
INQUIRE
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Untitled *
1969
Original lithograph in colors
Signed by the artist in pencil, dated and numbered
37 x 21 1/2 in (94 x 54.6 cm), unframed
Edition of 300
(With published embossed blind stamp)
SOLD
PAUL JENKINS was a colorful Abstract Expressionist who came of age during the heyday of the New York School and for several decades carried on its highly physical tradition of manipulating paint and canvas. In the late 1940s, joining a wave of aspiring painters moving to New York, Mr. Jenkins used the G.I. Bill to study at the Art Students League and soon met Jackson Pollock and befriended Mark Rothko. In 1953 he resettled in Paris, but maintained a lifelong connection with New York. Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas. His favorite tool for many years was an elegant ivory knife, which he used to guide the flow of paint. The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic landscapes. His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and ’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their own good.”
William Paul Jenkins was born — during a lightning storm, according to his official biography — in Kansas City, Mo., on July 12, 1923. As a boy, he met both Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. He worked weekends at a ceramics factory, where watching the master mold-maker’s handling of shape and color, he said, had a profound effect on his ideas about painting. By the 1970s and ’80s, his art career had provided him with a glamorous life, divided between France, where his work graced a Pierre Cardin boutique, and New York, where he kept an airy loft near Union Square that had previously belonged to Willem de Kooning. The first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, once visited the studio, and the party he gave for her was attended by guests like Paloma Picasso, Robert Motherwell and Berenice Abbott.
In 1971, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Sa
Paul Jenkins Francisco Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Jenkins’s work. But he got much more exposure in 1978, when his paintings had a starring role in the Paul Mazursky movie “An Unmarried Woman,” in which Alan Bates plays a smoldering, heavily bearded Manhattan artist. The paintings supposedly done by the Bates character were actually his work. Mr. Jenkins spent weeks teaching Mr. Bates how to approximate his methods of paint-pouring and canvas-wrestling, a way of making art that he described as tempting fate. “I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing past experience and my knowledge of the odds,” he said in 1964. “It’s a big gamble, and that’s why I love it.”
Paul Jenkins died at age 88 in 2012.
Jenkins, Paul
1969 Original lithograph in colors Signed by the artist in pencil, dated and numbered 37 x 21 1/2 in (94 x 54.6 cm), unframed Edition of 300 (With published embossed blind stamp) SOLDPAUL JENKINS was a colorful Abstract Expressionist who came of age during the heyday of the New York School and for several decades carried on its highly physical tradition of manipulating paint and canvas. In the late 1940s, joining a wave of aspiring painters moving to New York, Mr. Jenkins used the G.I. Bill to study at the Art Students League and soon met Jackson Pollock and befriended Mark Rothko. In 1953 he resettled in Paris, but maintained a lifelong connection with New York. Early on he adopted a tactile, chance-driven method of painting that privileged almost every technique over brushwork. Dribbling paint Pollock-like onto loose canvasses, he allowed it to roll, pool and bleed, and he sometimes kneaded and hauled on the canvas. His favorite tool for many years was an elegant ivory knife, which he used to guide the flow of paint. The billowy, undulating results could look like psychedelic landscapes. His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and ’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their own good.”
William Paul Jenkins was born — during a lightning storm, according to his official biography — in Kansas City, Mo., on July 12, 1923. As a boy, he met both Thomas Hart Benton and Frank Lloyd Wright. He worked weekends at a ceramics factory, where watching the master mold-maker’s handling of shape and color, he said, had a profound effect on his ideas about painting. By the 1970s and ’80s, his art career had provided him with a glamorous life, divided between France, where his work graced a Pierre Cardin boutique, and New York, where he kept an airy loft near Union Square that had previously belonged to Willem de Kooning. The first lady of France, Danielle Mitterrand, once visited the studio, and the party he gave for her was attended by guests like Paloma Picasso, Robert Motherwell and Berenice Abbott.
In 1971, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts and the Sa
Paul Jenkins Francisco Museum of Art organized a retrospective of Mr. Jenkins’s work. But he got much more exposure in 1978, when his paintings had a starring role in the Paul Mazursky movie “An Unmarried Woman,” in which Alan Bates plays a smoldering, heavily bearded Manhattan artist. The paintings supposedly done by the Bates character were actually his work. Mr. Jenkins spent weeks teaching Mr. Bates how to approximate his methods of paint-pouring and canvas-wrestling, a way of making art that he described as tempting fate. “I try to paint like a crapshooter throwing dice, utilizing past experience and my knowledge of the odds,” he said in 1964. “It’s a big gamble, and that’s why I love it.”
Paul Jenkins died at age 88 in 2012.