| Paul Jenkins | |
|---|---|
| Born | July 12, 1923 Kansas City, Missouri |
| Nationality | American |
| Field | Painting |
| Training | Art Students League of New York with Yasuo Kuniyoshi |
| Movement | Abstract expressionism, Lyrical abstraction |
Paul Jenkins (born July 12, 1923) is an American abstract expressionist painter.
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He was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri. In Kansas City, the artist met Frank Lloyd Wright who was commissioned by the artist's great-uncle, the Rev. Burris Jenkins, to rebuild his church after a fire. Also during his years in Kansas City, the young Jenkins visited Thomas Hart Benton and confided his intention to become a painter. The Eastern art of the Nelson-Atkins Museum [then the William Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery] had an early influence on him. In his teenage years, he moved to Struthers, Ohio to live with his mother and stepfather, who ran the local newspaper. From the U.S. Maritime Service, entered the U.S. Naval Air Corps during the war years. In 1948, he moved to New York City where, on the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Yasuo Kuniyoshi (four years) and with Morris Kantor. During that time, he met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. In 1953, he traveled to Europe, working for three months in Taormina, Sicily before settling in Paris. From 1955 on, the artist has shared his time between New York and Paris. His first solo exhibition in New York was in 1956 with the Martha Jackson Gallery, a flagship gallery at the time. In the '50s, Jenkins achieved prominence both in New York and Europe for his early abstractions. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchases a painting from this exhibition. Peggy Guggenheim purchased a painting from the artist's studio in Paris in 1959. In 1972, he began to exhibit with Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer in New York. In 1973, Harry N. Abrams published an extensive monograph with text by the late distinguished art historian, Albert E. Elsen. In 1983, Harry N. Abrams published Anatomy of a Cloud, a book of autobiographical collages and texts by the artist.
As of 2010, he continues to work in acrylic on canvas, as well as watercolor on paper. His work is found in international museums and collections including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio (near Struthers), the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the National Gallery of Art and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Fogg Museum of Art of Harvard University, Cambridge, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Fondation Maeght in Saint-Paul, France, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, and the Tate Gallery in London.
Retrospective exhibitions include:
Major solo exhibitions include: