ILYA BOLOTOWSKY (1907-1981)
When I came to New York just out of graduate school twenty years ago, I shared the all to conventional wisdom that if art was geometric and somewhat relational, it was Mondrian, and thus I thought of Ilya Bolotowsky as having come after something. But then I began actually to look at the work, and I’m still finding out just how wrong I was.
He was there early, among the first, for a lot of things: He was there early to show American art how good art could come from other art, how looking at Mondrian, Miro and Malevitch could lead to art that was strong, authentic, and original. We know he was a pioneer of abstract art, but just how difficult and just how important this was, and just what the full sweep of its consequences and implications were – I don’t think we fully know that either. He was there early to develop and carry out large-scale public murals in the thirties, murals which gave full power, scale and grandeur to abstract art for the first time in this country, and formed a legacy to which we are still indebted.
There is a lot more, too. But I’ll just say that I am grateful to him for sharing his warmth with me, and most of all, for leaving an art that will stay on for all of us. My life is richer for it, and for him.
WILLIAM C. AGEE
Evelyn Kranes Kossak Professor of Art History at Hunter College
“Ilya Bolotowsky,” a catalogue published by the Washburn Gallery to accompany The Memorial Exhibition held January 6 – February 23, 1983.
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In the early fifties, David Smith, while staying at my studio on one of his infrequent visits to N.Y., said “Let’s visit Boly.” I asked, “Who is Boly?” not knowing that Ilya Bolotowsky was nicknamed “Boly” by his intimates. We went to his studio. “Boly” was glad to see us. I in turn was delighted to meet this artist who seemed to be a character out of Chekhov’s short stories. His luxuriant mustache was the samovar of a heritage he still kept from Russia. It seemed like a security blanket which he stroked when his staccato way of speaking rushed pell-mell, like a mountain stream, on some subject that excited him – generally about painting. His eyes, impatient, observant, darting with intelligence, never stopped moving in conversation. One was caught between the cascading monologue and the inquisitive, searching eyes. When I got to know him better I discovered that he had many interests other than painting – one of which was film-making. However his painting was first. These classical, austere, and precise paintings stemmed from Mondrian, but in his hands they took a personal attitude, bringing it into the latter part of the 20th century. As if he needed an escape valve from the disciplined formalism of his painting, he sometimes turned to the making of motion pictures.
There is nothing more directly opposite to Ilya’s painting than Surrealist and symbolic images, where chance is welcomed as coming from the unconscious. During the years I got to know him better, he would occasionally show his Surrealist films where one could find any symbol one wanted in the lexicon of psychology. His son Andrew was sometimes the assistant director, assistant cameraman, assistant projectionist, and leading janitor, in Ilya’s motion picture company…
Ilya was partial to the idea of a community of artists, especially those artists that held advanced ideas unacceptable to the general art world. It was not only the political climate of the thirties that made him join the various art organizations that sprang up during the depression, but more to help create a cultural atmosphere that would be inductive to creativity. He was one of the founders of American Abstract Artists – and the more political Artists Union – and was a member of the Federation of Modern Painters and Sculptors.
What is left of the “community of artists” will miss “Boly” as one whose integrity as an artist was unassailable. There are few of those left.
There is no doubt in my mind that Boly will have a place in the annals of 20th century American painting.
HERMAN CHERRY
“Ilya Bolotowsky,” a catalogue published by the Washburn Gallery to accompany The Memorial Exhibition held January 6 – February 23, 1983.