Ilya Bolotowsky was born in 1907 in Petrograd, Russia. His family fled to Constantinople in 1920, and a few years later relocated in New York. During World War II, Bolotowsky served in the Army. Due to his fluency in Russian, he was assigned as a technical translator to the base in Nome, Alaska, where he helped Soviet pilots navigate and repair aircrafts.
The many Joan Miro exhibitions at the Pierre Mattise Gallery throughout the 1930s had a major impact on his work. Throughout the rest of the thirties, he experimented with composing organic, biomorphic forms. Bolotowsky became a founding member of the American Abstract Artists, and through Burgoyne Diller, worked as an abstract mural painter for the WPA.
The Piet Mondrian exhibition at the Valentine Gallery in 1942 had a profound influence on Bolotowsky. Throughout the 1940s, his style progressed as he introduced flat lines and geometric shapes that draw heavily from his admiration of Mondrian. He became interested in what he describes as a sisyphean pursuit of an ideal in harmony within his paintings, an undertaking which he continues for the rest of his life. His paintings developed into his own version of Neoplasticism, simplifying to right-angles and nuanced color relationships. He increasingly worked with unusual formats such as tondos and diamonds.
Untitl his death in 1981, Bolotowsky continued work in this style. He explains, “I work in the neo-plastic style because for me it is the most meaningful and exciting direction in art. Neoplasticism can achieve unequaled tension, equilibrium, and harmony through the relationship of the vertical and horizontal elements.” (Ilya Bolotowsky, March 14, 1969).
Ilya Bolotowsky, represented by the Washburn Gallery for many years, is present in many Museum and Public Collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the San Francisco Museum of Art. In 1974, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized a solo exhibition for Bolotowsky that also traveled to The National Collection in Washington D.C.
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Interview with Ilya Bolotowsky by Louise Averill Svendsen with Mimi Poser, 1974, Ilya Bolotowsky, The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, pp. 17 - 18
LAS How did you get into the W.P.A. mural project?
IB I was told by Mrs. Balcomb Greene, Gertrude Greene, that Diller (Burgoyne Diller) was starting a W.P.A. mural project trying to use abstract artists of the day. I was already trying to do abstractions and I went to see Diller and I was asked to submit sketches. After a lot of trouble because the teachers’ project would not let me off, I was finally transferred to the mural project. The first mural design that I did was for the Williamsburg Housing Project. The architect for this project was William Lescaze, one of the few modern architects of the day, and sympathetic to abstract art. This was the beginning of something new. And I don’t think people realize that at that time Diller was instrumental in something historical . . .. He played the most important role in the development of abstract art in this country as mural project administrator even giving up his own painting for quite a while. And yet he was painting Neo-Plastic paintings as early as 1934. He was totally dedicated to promoting abstract style in murals before abstract art was accepted in the U.S. He deserves absolute full credit for his work in all the future art history books.
LAS Was it because of your involvement in the W.P.A. that during this period, I think it was 1936, that you and your friends were instrumental in founding the American Abstract Artists association?
IB It was more or less like this, although not entirely. The reason was very indirect Harry Holtzman, a student of Hans Hofmann, was Diller’s assistant in the W.P.A. mural project. Holtzman had rented a big loft . . . which he painted a la Mondrian, all white. All just right, and he wanted to teach his idea of Neo-Plastic art, and he wanted artists to come and discuss things there, so that the young fellows who would study with him would also have a kind of intellectual atmosphere. And so he invited a whole bunch of us who also were on the mural project and some of the others to meet in his loft. But what happened was this: the bunch came to discuss not Holtzman’s ideas but rather how to organize a group and to exhibit. Out of this developed the American Abstract Artists. Actually, the term abstract was not very well defined at this time.
LAS You didn’t hang labels on yourselves in this period.
IB Well, it was just beginning to emerge, I mean the idea of definitions, but it was still very vague. The main distinction was this: there were people who would paint and abstract from nature, and there were those who dares to simply abstract without any nature at all. And between the two groups there was a certain amount of tension. The Hofmann students really belonged, more or less, to those who abstract from nature to some extent. I never studied with Hofmann, neither did Balcomb Greene. We were people who did not abstract from nature at all. Although I did some Cubist paintings, I felt they were not entirely abstract. And so the American Abstract Artists tried to establish a definition of what is abstract. We could never get a definition to suit everybody and finally gave up the attempt because of the arguments that came out of it.
LAS Did you continue to meet informally?
IB Oh yes. Soon other people joined like George L.K. Morris, even Albert Eugene Gallatin and the American Abstract Artists was formally organized. Also there was an attempt on the other part of the bunch, the socially minded people, some of them might have been, and some, who were not but were just affected by the depression. They felt that art had to serve people, in a more direct way, and that art should derive from nature. Although how that would serve the people, I really don’t know. And so, there were several movements within the same abstract group. The socially conscious group was depending mostly on Picasso. There was also a non-social Picasso renaissance. It was an amusing coincidence, because Picasso, in spite of his abstract quality, always had some feeling of nature in his work. There was some empathy, some feeling of inner vitality or some feeling of nature, some quality of the texture of nature that the pure abstractionists would not have. For that matter, Leger also never achieved pure abstraction for long. He painted a few paintings which were geometric and some which were almost Mondrian like. But he finally quit in disgust, and said, “That’s for saints and I am a man.” He had no use for it.