A LIVING LEGEND REVISITED

Paul Jenkins is one of those rare artists whose work, over the course of six decades, continues to focus on color and movement in new ways. Art lovers now have the opportunity to revisit a dynamic period of his career. His exquisite color-drenched abstractions are the subject of a new exhibition, Paul Jenkins: Space, Color, and Light, The 1960s and 1970s, at D. Wigmore Fine Art, Inc. in New York from May 9 to July 2. To ensure that Jenkins’s paintings were in the best possible condition for the show, gallery owner Deedee Wigmore called upon Lowy, who has restored a number of works by Jenkins over the years, most recently for an exhibition of his paintings from the 1950s, which was also organized by Wigmore.

"Lowy did such an excellent job on Paul’s 1950s paintings," says Wigmore. "He doesn’t want his works to look radically cleaned, and Lowy knew exactly how to interpret them. It was hard to tell the difference between the examples that Lowy conserved and those that had not been touched. So, of course, we are delighted to be working with them again." Wigmore says her aim with the current exhibition is to continue presenting an historical chronology of Jenkins’s art, while highlighting its "ravishing beauty."

Jenkins rose to fame in the 1950s with his luminous, large-scale abstract paintings incorporating veils of rich color. His process of pouring paint directly onto the canvas, which he manipulates to achieve a desired effect, remains a hallmark of his work. The technical virtuosity, expressiveness and transcendental quality of his art represent the innovative spirit of American Abstract Expressionism. Yet Jenkins cannot be confined to an historical time frame, for his art occupies a dimension of its own, expressing an ambiguity that invites multiple interpretations. Jenkins distills the essence of his paintings in dynamic, controlled improvisations of light, form and color, guided by his intuition and mystical leanings.

"One of the essential elements in painting to me is light. The light that is seen from underneath, for example, must be within the form and work with the structure to be significant," Jenkins says of his art. "To paint is to affirm an irrefutable presence, and I don’t mean this in the figurative sense. That which happens is independent and creates its own history. I enter a state of being with the paint, a language unfolds—a dialogue with the paint and the intention made manifest."

Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923, Jenkins studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League in New York from 1948 to 1952, when he met Abstract Expressionists Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and Jackson Pollock, whom Jenkins credits as having a significant impact on his life and work. In 1953, he settled in Paris, where he began to experiment with poured paints on canvas and paper, finding inspiration in the luminous pastels of Odilon Redon and the imbued color of Gustave Moreau’s works. Throughout the 1950s, Jenkins became a significant figure on the Paris and New York art scenes, coming to know artists such as Jean Dubuffet, Mark Tobey, Willem de Kooning and Robert Motherwell. In the following decades, he mastered a variety of media, including watercolors, prints, sculpture and sets for film and theater, while exhibiting his work at galleries and museums worldwide. In his 86th year, Jenkins continues to paint every day and exhibit widely. His works grace the permanent collections of many major museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Tate Gallery in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

Jenkins’s paintings from the 1960s and ‘70s, which are executed in acrylic, are among the finest of his career, according to Wigmore. Many of the 21 paintings in the upcoming exhibition were in Jenkins’s private collection and have not been shown for more than 30 years. "Artists were engaged in a lot of technical experimentation in the 1960s and ‘70s, when acrylics became a new medium," Wigmore says. "In these works, Paul created a complex dialogue between colors, shapes and the white gessoed background, while retaining the juicy, rich, liquid color for which he is known. His technical and painterly skills are amazing, and people are drawn to the sheer beauty of his work. He’s truly a living legend."

Regarding the evolution of his materials, Jenkins says: "In the 50s, I worked in oil with a certain kind of enamel that I was able to acquire in Paris and which is no longer made. I made the oil paint fluid with various mediums, and each variant created a specific result which I was able to observe and integrate into the painting. From about 1960, I started to work in acrylic, which gave me opacity and translucency at the same time. I have always varnished both my oil and acrylic paintings, because I feel the surface should be protected. And I have always worked on primed canvas, because I do not want the paint to be absorbed into the canvas in a saturated way."

Because Jenkins worked in the innovative and evolving medium of acrylic during the 1960s and ‘70s, each of these paintings has its own individual character, thus requiring unique, individualized conservation treatments. Jenkins himself worked closely with Lowy’s conservators to preserve the visual aspect he wanted. Fortunately, his paintings were already in good shape when they came to Lowy, having been wrapped and stored well. They primarily needed cleaning to remove a thin layer of accumulated dirt and revarnishing. Some of the canvases also had acquired stretcher bar marks and other minor surface changes over the years. These works were treated with heat and humidity on a vacuum table and in some cases, the versos of the paintings were infused with the thermoplastic adhesive Beva 372, to preserve the original canvas, mitigate and consolidate the distortions.

The major challenge, however, came with cleaning. "Not only were the paintings large and, therefore, difficult to maneuver, each one had its own specific reaction to the cleaning solvents and detergents," says Bill Santel, Lowy’s head conservator. Because acrylic paints are more soluble than oil paints, Lowy’s team had to work like detectives and adjust the solvents and detergents accordingly, depending upon the solubility level of the paint mixture and the type of gesso and glazes used by the artist. "When it was not possible to use a solvent, we cleaned with an aqueous detergent, which we applied only to specific areas of the canvas," says Bill. "It was a time-consuming process, but it was worth the wait. It was exciting to be able to work with Paul and recapture the original vibrancy of his art."

Jenkins was decidedly pleased with the results. "A painting has an inherent stability, whether or not it is in need of a cleaning or other serious care," he says. "It is this constant that is of primary importance, because the painting must always remain its intrinsic self. After a painting has been cleaned, it should not look as if it had undergone a cleaning. The artist’s concern is that in the restorer’s hands the work will lose its essence. I have seen Lowy meet the challenge of this difficult terrain." Wigmore, too, commended Lowy on a job well done, just in time for the exhibition. "We’re thrilled that Lowy’s conservators were able to reveal Paul’s genius more fully," she says. "Larry Shar invests real money in the training of his staff, and they stay at Lowy long enough to grow and mature in their craft. As a result, they produce work that is consistently high quality. I can always count on Lowy getting everything just right!"

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