ilya bolotowsky     ... ilya bolotowsky born in st. petersburg 1907 ...

ilya bolotowsky had his first new york one-man show in 1930 and has exhibited here regularly since the early 1950's. not before this current assess ment of bolotowsky's oeuvre has he been presented alone in a new york museum show. his steadfast adherence to stylistic ideals that were often out of fashion and overshadowed by other trends is at least in part responsible for such delayed acceptance. bolotowsky was already painting abstract murals in the 1930's when social realism dominated the scene. In the 1940's, as a member of the american abstract artists, he had already em-braced mondrian's neo- plastic ideals and never swerved in his commitment to this rational alternative to movements based upon a release of subconscious imagery. subsequently a widespread preoccupation with abstract ex-pressionism of the 1950's and the rather single-minded pursuit of the idioms that grew out of it, left bolotowsky in an isolated position which he used sagely to enrich and deepen his in-creasingly personal expression. thomas m. messer               original graphic 1978 size 50 x 70 cm