Ilya Bolotowsky

Ilya Bolotowsky was born in Petrograd, Russia. In 1920, following the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Bolotowsky family was forced to leave the country. They found refuge in Istanbul, Turkey, where Bolotowsky studied art at the College of Saint Joseph. In September 1923 the family settled in New York, and Bolotowsky became an American citizen six years later. From 1929 to 1930 he studied at the National Academy of Design, where he won first prize for drawing and painting as well as a Tiffany Foundation Scholarship.

In 1933 Bolotowsky was introduced to Piet Mondrian's work at A. E. Gallatin's Gallery of Living at New York University. Mondrian, the revolutionary Dutch painter, developed Neo-Plasticism, an aesthetic that reduces form to straight lines and rectangular shapes and uses only the primary colors and black and white. Bolotowsky was greatly influenced by the clean, pure, formal approach of Mondrian's paintings.

As a struggling artist during the Depression, Bolotowsky was an active member of the Mural Division of the WPA Federal Arts Project from 1935 to 1941. During the 1930s he also became a member of The Ten, a group of figurative Expressionists that included Adolph Gottlieb and Mark Rothko. In 1936 Bolotowsky helped found the American Abstract Artists, a cooperative group of avant-garde artists who worked in several abstract styles, including Cubism, Neo-Plasticism, and Biomorphism. In order to support himself, Bolotowsky taught at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina from 1946 to 1948 and was an associate professor at the University of Wyoming from 1946 to 1957.

In his later work, Bolotowsky began to use circular and diamond shaped canvases. Influenced by the color-field painters and Minimalists of the late 1960s, such as Frank Stella, Bolotowsky expanded his fields of color into ever wider bands that dominated the canvas. He continued working in this vein until his death at the age of seventy-four.