Paul Jenkins (painter) - Biography

Biography

William Paul Jenkins was born in 1923 in Kansas City, Missouri, where he was raised. He met Frank Lloyd Wright who was commissioned by the artist's great-uncle, the Rev. Burris Jenkins ], to rebuild his church in Kansas City after a fire. (Wright suggested that Jenkins should think about a career in agriculture rather than art.) The young Jenkins also visited Thomas Hart Benton and confided his intention to become a painter. The Eastern art collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum (then, the William Rockhill Nelson Art Gallery) had an early influence on him.

In his teenage years, Jenkins moved to Struthers, Ohio to live with his mother, Nadyne Herrick, and stepfather, who both ran the local newspaper, the Hometown Journal (then the Struthers Journal). After graduating from Struthers High School, he served in the U.S. Maritime Service and entered the U.S. Naval Air Corps during World War II. In 1948, he moved to New York City where, on the G.I. Bill, he studied at the Art Students League of New York with Yasuo Kuniyoshi for four years, and with Morris Kantor. During that time, he met Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock Lee Krasner, and Barnett Newman. In 1953, he traveled to Europe, working for three months in Taormina in Sicily before settling in Paris, France.

From 1955 on, the artist split his time between New York and Paris. His first solo exhibition in New York was in 1956 with the Martha Jackson Gallery, a leading gallery of the time. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased a painting from this exhibition. In the '50s, Jenkins achieved prominence both in New York and Europe for his early abstractions. Peggy Guggenheim purchased a painting from the artist's studio in Paris in 1959. In 1972, he began to exhibit with Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer in New York.

During the 1970s and '80s, his accomplished paintings were sought after, allowing him to lead a glamorous lifestyle, and noted personalities, such as Danielle Mitterrand, wife of the President of France, were counted among his patrons. Jenkins gained a level of notoriety when his paintings appeared in the Academy Award nominated 1978 movie An Unmarried Woman directed by Paul Mazursky. The film featured a brooding and bearded British abstract painter played by Alan Bates. Jenkins created the eye-catching art in the film supposedly made by the character, and he taught Bates his paint manipulation technique for his acting role. In 1987, through the initiative of Jean-Louis Martinoty, the Paris Opera staged Shaman to the Prism Seen, a dance-drama written by the artist retracing the passage of colors through the prism. More than 6,000 items from the artist's archives are now at the Archives of American Art of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, constituting an important documentary source.

Jenkins died at age 88 in Manhattan, USA on June 9, 2012 after a brief illness. The Strand Bookstore in Manhattan, which the artist loved to frequent over many years, devoted an entire window to him when they learned of his passing.