Paul Jenkins (b. 1923, Kansas City, Missouri, d. 2012, New York, New York) was an American painter who is celebrated for his dynamic abstractions in oil, acrylic, and enamel. His paintings are characterized by their masterfully controlled, multilayered washes of pigment that meet on canvas in oceanic pools and eddies. While the artist’s work was initially received in the terms of American Abstract Expressionism, his sustained, rigorous inquiries into the physiological and spiritual aspects of colour, what the artist termed its “phenomena,” opened it to new avenues of expression that would outlast numerous movements throughout his six-decade career. Coming to artistic maturity in New York at Abstract Expressionism’s height, Jenkins befriended many of the movement’s leading figures before decamping to Paris, which would serve as his second base of operations for the rest of his life. In Paris the painter established the conditions for his now-celebrated process, in which pigments are coaxed along the surface of a canvas that has been primed and buffed to a silken plane. By manipulating the angle of the surface on which paints traveled and by guiding their movements with an ivory knife, Jenkins produced a body of work that is striking for the singularity of its maker’s conviction while evidencing his spiritual restlessness and continual seeking.

Works

Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back Phenomena Crow Wing Back
Phenomena Crow Wing Back
1967
Phenomena Granular Veil
Phenomena Granular Veil
1975

Public Collections

Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley
Blanton Museum of Art, Austin
Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn
British Museum, London
Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh
Cantor Arts Center, Stanford
Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington
Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington
Ferens Art Gallery, Hull
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
Fogg Museum of Art, Cambridge
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington
Israel Museum, Jerusalem
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles
McNay Art Museum, San Antonio
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Musée National d'Art Moderne, Paris
Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima
Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo
Museum of Modern Art, New York
National Gallery of Art, Washington
National Museum of Art, Osaka
National Museum of Western Art, Tokyo
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City
Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia
San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Tate, London
Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Tel Aviv
Ulster Museum, Belfast
Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York