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Paul Jenkins (1923-2012) was a major figure in postwar American abstraction, celebrated for luminous paintings in which translucent veils of color flow, collide, and unfold across the canvas. Associated with Abstract Expressionism and the development of lyrical abstraction, Jenkins created a highly individual painting language that combined spontaneity with an extraordinary degree of control.
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1923, Jenkins served in the U.S. military during World War II before moving to New York in 1948. He studied at the Art Students League of New York with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and became immersed in the emerging New York art world. His circle and artistic environment brought him into contact with many of the artists shaping postwar abstraction.
In 1953, Jenkins moved to Europe and established a studio in Paris, beginning a lifelong pattern of working between Paris and New York. His first solo exhibitions followed in the 1950s, including exhibitions at Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle and Martha Jackson Gallery in New York. His work quickly attracted institutional and private collectors; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and collector Peggy Guggenheim were among those who acquired his paintings.
The Phenomena Paintings
Jenkins is best known for the paintings he called Phenomena, a title he began using for his works in the 1960s. Rather than applying paint primarily with a traditional brush, Jenkins poured liquid pigment directly onto the surface, manipulating its movement by tilting the canvas and guiding the paint as it flowed. He also became known for using an ivory knife to direct the paint without sacrificing its fluidity. The resulting compositions can appear simultaneously spontaneous and carefully orchestrated.
Color was fundamental to Jenkins’s art. Saturated reds, blues, yellows, greens, and violets meet in translucent passages that suggest light passing through stained glass, clouds, water, geological formations, or other natural forces. Yet Jenkins resisted literal representation. His paintings instead evoke sensations of movement, atmosphere, energy, and transformation.
Although connected to the Abstract Expressionists, Jenkins developed an approach distinctly his own. His paintings balance chance and intention, transparency and density, movement and stillness. The flow of the pigment might be unpredictable, but Jenkins continually intervened—directing, stopping, and redirecting it until the composition achieved the balance he sought.
Jenkins worked across an unusually wide range of media throughout his career, including oil, acrylic, watercolor, collage, sculpture, and printmaking. He was also a writer and playwright. His paintings appeared prominently in Paul Mazursky’s 1978 film An Unmarried Woman, further introducing his distinctive imagery to an international audience.
His career included important solo museum exhibitions and presentations at institutions including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Corcoran Gallery of Art; San Francisco Museum of Art; and Musée des Beaux-Arts de Charleroi. His work was also included in American Postwar Painting at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Quelques Américains à Paris at the Centre Pompidou in 1977.
Jenkins’s work is represented in major museum collections in the United States and internationally. The Museum of Modern Art holds his work and records his participation in a number of exhibitions beginning in the 1950s, while the Whitney Museum of American Art holds six works spanning from 1956 through 1999. His work is also represented in the Smithsonian American Art Museum and numerous other public and private collections.
Paul Jenkins continued to paint and exhibit throughout his life, dividing much of his time between New York and Paris. He died in New York in 2012.
Today, Jenkins is recognized for transforming the inherent fluidity of paint into a sophisticated and immediately recognizable visual language. His finest works possess a remarkable sense of movement and luminosity—the paint seems less applied to the canvas than released across it. His Phenomena paintings remain a distinctive contribution to the history of postwar American abstraction.
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