AMERINGER/HOWARD FINE ART
I don't know if Jules Olitski is the greatest living painter, as Clement Greenberg once claimed, but his late works certainly offer a supreme abstract version of the "splendid manner," a term Giovanni Pietro Bellori applied to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin in the seventeenth century. A splendid manner requires above all grand subject matter: in Poussin's case, scenes from the Bible and Greek myth; in Olitski's, our origins, both personal and universal, and our common end in death and (one hopes) transfiguration. Bellori considered Poussin the ultimate philosophical painter; Olitski, with these recent works, seems to have become the …
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