Commissar Demikovsky

Commissar Demikovsky is the title Russian-born painter Jules Olitski gave to this almost completely monochrome picture. The color red dominates, and some complementary green breaks through on the margins. Judging by the title Olitski chose, the picture is dedicated to his father, who was executed as a Bolshevik during the Russian civil war a few months before the birth of his son in the year 1922. A short time later he and his mother emigrated to the United States. Olitski received his art education in New York and Paris. In the 1960s he began to use spray cans to apply paint. As in the painting Commissar Demikovsky, he creates surface structures in which the subjective signature is so reduced that the work can be seen in the context of minimal art. Olitski is one of the main representatives of color-field painting in context of “post-painterly abstraction,” a style of painting that was directed against the gestural approach of abstract expressionism. In 1966 Jules Olitski was one of the first living artists to be given a show at the New York Metropolitan Museum. Even if Olitski’s career, which began in the 1960s, soon began to stagnate, art critic Clement Greenberg still called him the “greatest living artist.”