Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins is a master of color. In his canvases, radiant colors swirl, fuse, divide, recede, and float in exquisite combinations. Since the early 1960s, when he developed his unique style, Jenkins has been one of America's foremost artists. In this first full-scale volume on the artist, Albert E. Elsen, distinguished art historian and Professor of Art History at Stanford University, has drawn on Jenkins's diaries and on numerous conversations with him to create a fully rounded view of the man and his work. "In writing about a living artist," he says, "the historian must remind himself that he should ask questions such as those we would like to have had answered by artists of the past, before the recording of art history." While there is no subject matter in Jenkins's paintings, there is a constant search for meaning expressed within the terms of the medium itself, and for ways to paint something that is there but cannot be seen except through the experience of painting. This importance to Jenkins of conceptual content sets him apart from other contemporary colorists. Jenkins's comments on older art illuminate what he seeks to accomplish: "Two kinds of light have always drawn me. The light of Georges de La Tour, which seems to radiate from the painting, and that reflected light which was most evident in Turner's imagination. From these two sources--reflection and radiation--I have tried to achieve a kind of form in its own discovered space, a kind of light which reveals itself from within, while the reflected element affirms itself from without." With 171 illustrations, including 56 hand-tipped plates in full color.