Artist of the day: Artist of the Day, August 30, 2021: Paul Jenkins, an American abstract expressionist painter (#1351)

Paul Jenkins (1923 – 2012) was an American abstract expressionist painter and member of the New York School.

William Paul Jenkins (known as Paul Jenkins) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was raised. He met Frank Lloyd Wright who was commissioned by the artist's great-uncle, the Rev. Burris Jenkins to rebuild his church in Kansas City, Missouri after a fire. (Wright suggested that Jenkins should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.) The young Jenkins also visited Thomas Hart Benton and confided his intention to become a painter. The Eastern art collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum had an early influence on him.

In his teenage years, Jenkins moved to Struthers, Ohio to live with his mother, and stepfather, who both ran the local newspaper, the Hometown Journal. After graduating from Struthers High School, he served in the U.S. Maritime Service and entered the U.S. Naval Air Corps during World War II. In 1948, he moved to New York City where, on the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Art Students League of New York for four years. During that time, he met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and Barnett Newman. In 1953, he traveled to Europe, working for three months in Taormina in Sicily before settling in Paris, France. From 1955 on, the artist shared his time between New York and Paris.

Jenkins’s innovative practice was characterized by his choice to avoid the paintbrush altogether, instead allowing pigment to pool, bloom, or roll across the surface of his canvases, guiding the paint with a knife to create fluid fields of color, as seen his work Phenomena Anderson (1972). “With the smooth organic surface of the ivory, I could use great pressure against the sensitive tooth of the canvas,” the artist said of his process. Jenkins worked at a ceramics factory in his youth, an experience that heavily influenced his tactile methods of painting. Jenkins remained tied to the city even during his move to Paris during the 1950s. The painter died on June 9, 2012 in New York, NY at the age of 88. Today, his works are included in the collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among others.

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