Paul Jenkins

Paul Jenkins was an American abstract painter known for luminous canvases of flowing, translucent color. Born in Kansas City in 1923, he came up alongside the Abstract Expressionists in postwar New York, but he found his own route by pouring and steering thinned paint across the surface, often tilting the canvas and guiding the flow with an ivory knife instead of a brush. The results look like veils of light bleeding into one another.

From the early 1960s he titled almost all of his works Phenomena, followed by a short phrase, treating each painting as another study of color as a living, moving thing. He divided his time between New York and Paris and stayed productive for decades, with his paintings held in major museums around the world. Jenkins kept working until close to his death in 2012.