Ilya Bolotowsky
American, born Russia, 1907 - 1981Untitled, 1969
Not on view
Silkscreen on paper
Dimensions24 × 24 in. (61 × 61 cm)
Museum purchase, 1969.36
Ilya Bolotowsky emigrated from Russia to the United States in 1923 and studied at the National Academy of Design in New York. During the mid-1930s, Bolotowsky, already familiar with the work of the Russian avant-garde, encountered a work by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, which dramatically influenced his ideas about art. Bolotowsky soon adopted Mondrian’s geometric, purely non-representational approach to painting. The artistic movement that Bolotowsky is associated with is called geometric abstraction, which focuses on simple geometric forms, non-objective compositions, and flat, bold colors. It evolved from the Cubist movement of the early 20th century. Bolotowsky distills Mondrian’s visual language in this austere arrangement of blue, black, and yellow bands of varying proportions.
