Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri. During the years 1948 to 1952, he studied with Yasuo Kuniyoshi at the Art Students League in New York, and came to know Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman. In 1954, after traveling to Italy and working several months in Taormina, he moved to Paris where his first solo exhibition was held at the Studio Paul Facchetti. The following year, in 1955, the Zoe Dusanne Gallery in Seattle presented his first solo exhibition in the U.S. ― the Seattle Museum was the first museum to purchase his work. In 1956, his first solo exhibition in New York took place at the prominent Martha Jackson Gallery. The Whitney Museum of American Art purchased an important painting from this exhibition. In 1959, after a series of works entitled “Eyes of the Dove”, he began to title his canvases “Phenomena”, and gradually moved from oils and enamels to acrylic. During the Sixties, he travelled in Europe, Russia, India and Japan, where he worked with Yoshihara and the Gutai in Osaka. The 1964 film documentary “The Ivory Knife: Paul Jenkins at Work” received the Golden Eagle Award at the Venice Film Festival in 1966 and was shown in New York at the Museum of Modern Art. In 1983, he was named Commandeur des Arts et Lettres de la Republique de France. Regarded as one of the most important artists of the XX century, his works are in the collections of major museums worldwide, including the Tate Gallery in London; the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the National Museum of Western Art in Tokyo.