Holding Space: A close reading of Jules Olitski’s “Harlow Flow”
For our final field trip, our class was introduced to and dissected three mid-century modernist paintings from the Winnipeg Art Gallery’s archives. Kenneth Lochhead’s Night Green, Jack Bush’s Red Hook, and Jules Olitski’s Harlow Flow were the works we looked at and discussed, and in making them the backdrop of our conversations revolving mid-century modernism more broadly, the theme of these three artists negotiating their respective personalities into ‘major art’ recurred in our notes and conversations. In our previous essays, we had already investigated some of the values that may have been expressed and embedded in Lochhead’s paintings, and for Bush, we looked for traces of his background in advertisement which he seeks to ‘balloon’ into the category of high art. The most evident display of an internal conflict, in my opinion, was Harlow Flow. The painting’s saturated colours and prodigious presence struck me as a superfluous, multi-faced painting that embodies the spirit of many artists we looked at throughout our class lectures. I was enthralled, and admittedly a bit repelled by its potency and – as one of my classmates put it – how “disgustingly sentimental” it was. In this essay I will closely read Harlow Flow, Jules Olitski’s 1963 painting. I will pay close attention to the right side of the painting to try and enunciate its ebullience and its internal conflict which Michael Fried’s Three American Painters essay speaks to in Olitski’s oeuvre more broadly. The implications of Olitski’s negotiation between his personal convictions and of status quo modern painting are embodied in Harlow Flow’s appearance as well as the process which conceived it.
Harlow Flow has an overbearing presence. Its size definitely plays a role in this, but its true vulgarity comes through the intensity of the painting’s eloquent monochromatic colours, which are accentuated by the more ecstatic moments towards the right side of the paintings. On the left, Olitksi presents a gorgeous Rothko-Esque moment consisting of a flattened, floating, blush-colored orb hovering above a purple ‘landscape’ constructed by wet paint. Layers upon layers of paint formulate a sense of immensity, which is both countered and encouraged by the sharp, but never straight borders surrounding each colour. Its enormous size, surface flatness, and arbitrary form is overwhelming but not particularly needle-moving in the grand scheme of modernist painting. Seeing it in person, I was immediately reminded of my experience seeing Mark Rothko’s Number 16 (Two Whites, Two Reds) colour field painting in Montreal, and with time, Harlow Flow began to rhyme with some of the works of Morris Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, which I have not seen in person but am familiar with thanks to our extensive investigations throughout this class. This echoing of his contemporaries could be read as Olitski showing off his “advanced taste,” something that Fried rightfully identifies as an asset of Olitski’s, one which he often uses as a stool to reach for his convictions.
Like the paintings of Morris Louis, Harlow Flow wants to redefine its relationship between itself and time. Read from left to right, the painting speaks to the continual coloring and staining of its canvas. On the left we see the semi-translucent effects of wet paint, which seamlessly fades into heavy layers of paint, then pouring, and if we continue to read in this direction, we are led to a deconstruction of the painting’s formal aesthetic and coherence. On the right side, paint frees itself and overrules any previous sense of formal rigor found on its left. This, along with the severely stained backside of the canvas, become fossilized evidence of Olitski’s clinical process. Another example of time being teased can be seen below on the right side. Here, this grandiose accumulation of paint emulates, plays with, and defies what gravity does with time. The bottom of the yellow and orange section – decorated with lines of patina – hold and communicate a carnal sense of weight and suspension over the salmon-colored background, like heavy theatre drapes. It exudes a constant state of suspension, both as a gravitational surrender to attrition, as well as a tease to the picture’s own ‘uncovered’ potential. It could be said that here, Olitski acknowledges his ongoing negotiation between his own taste and that of his contemporaries by ‘covering’ his true convictions in the name of ‘formal painting.’
Tidal waves on the brink of splashing down are suspended high above the curtains, and between the two is an amalgamation of paint-perturbed canvas. Even though this space has been claimed by the yellow, in its dominion, the yellow’s only details are the results and consequences of the monotonous procedure which led it here. Beyond it, there are several lines of what looks to be creases, likely accumulated from the way in which the canvas was rolled. These lines emphasize the painting’s verticality, and the space that yellow holds compared to blush. Unlike the blush side of the painting, the right side’s edges are flared and undefined. Mirroring the blush corners which tease the hors-champ, the tidal waves and flares appear as though they are actively trying to occupy more space. The repetition expressed through the process of layering, the pours, and the constant rolling of the canvas all become the image itself. The tail begins to wag the dog as Olitski’s painting becomes a self-sufficient operation of pictorial occupation which only exacerbates its own dysmorphia.
Olitski’s desire to colonize the canvas with his own personal taste is clear. Just as Fried identifies in other Olitski paintings, Harlow Flow – through colors and form – strives to reach unearthed grounds, however the painting’s negotiation turns the canvas into a field of internal conflict and incoherence. This is because Olitski practically shoehorns his impulses onto and into the canvas in such a gross manner. The right side of Harlow Flow becomes a site for Olitski to claim as his, an opportunity to colonize space without building anything clear. His unfinished, continual desire to overthrow his own formal rigor is pictorially manifested, and it showcases his confusion and indecision, becoming the focal point of the painting. His ‘conviction’ does not lead him anywhere but in a position where he occupies arbitrary space. Despite Olitski’s evident awareness of corners which he communicates with the blush orb, the curtain and the tidal waves have a disseminating push to cover and occupy space inside and beyond the canvas. Michael Fried spoke about Olitski’s ability to repackage colours; he says that his level of saturation and articulations make colours feel ‘new,’ and in combining them, he creates interesting and unexpected colour dynamics. Fried says that this unity is comparable to Northern Renaissance paintings such as Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, in that a clear, complex pictorial situation emerges out of otherwise arbitrary objects. In response to this, I would agree with Fried’s notion, but I would also say that Harlow Flow’s unity almost solely lies in that both worlds – advanced taste and conviction – share a canvas. Their internal conflict is not a dance nor music as Fried describes, but a continuously growing occupation, a colonial project in which the strives of Olitski’s acquisition for real estate becomes the picture itself, vandalizing the footprints of his peers in the name of self-gratification and exposure. The situation he communicates, one of perpetual expansion, is clear but void of depth in favor of claiming surface space.
