Ilya Bolotowsky

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia in 1907, Ilya Bolotowsky lived through World War I and the Russian Revolution, then fled to the United States while still a teenager. Bolotowsky studied at the National Academy of Design between 1924 and 1930. He was associated with a group called "The Ten," a group of artists including Louis Schanker, Adolph Gottlieb, Mark Rothko, Ben-Zion, and Joseph Solman who rebelled against the strictures of the Academy and held independent exhibitions. Bolotowsky was strongly influenced by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian and the tenets of De Stijl, a movement that advocated the possibility of ideal order in the visual arts. The artist said "Nowadays, when paintings torture the retina, when music gradually destroys the eardrum, there must all the more be a need for an art that searches for new ways to achieve harmony and equilibrium." Bolotowsky adopted Mondrian's use of horizontal and vertical geometric pattern and a palette restricted to primary colors and neutrals. In 1936, Bolotowsky co-founded American Abstract artists. His 1936 mural for the Williamsburg Housing Project in Brooklyn was one of the first abstract murals done under the Federal Art Project. In the 1960s, he began making three dimensional forms. Bolotowsky's work was exhibited at the University of New Mexico in 1970. The artist's first solo museum show was in 1974 at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Bolotowsky taught at Black Mountain College from 1946 to 1948. He also taught at the University of Wyoming, Brooklyn College, Hunter College, Long Island University, the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater, and the University of New Mexico. Bolotowsky died on November 22, 1981 in New York City.