Ilya Bolotowsky
American, born Russia, 1907 - 1981Tondo, 1973
On view
Oil on canvas
Dimensions39 1/2 in. (100.3 cm)
Museum purchase, 2007.126
During the mid-1930s, Ilya Bolotowsky, already familiar with the work of the Russian avant-garde, encountered a work by the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian at an exhibition in New York, which dramatically influenced his ideas about art. Bolotowsky soon adopted Mondrian’s geometric, purely non-representational approach to painting. In this 1973 work, one of a series of tondo (circular format) paintings from late in his career, Bolotowsky distills Mondrian’s visual language in this austere arrangement of yellow, gold, and blue bands of varying proportions, which, against the painting’s pale blue ground, will play tricks on the eye.
Born in St. Petersburg in 1907, Bolotowsky immigrated to the United States in 1923, settling in New York City. From 1924 to 1930, Bolotowsky studied at the National Academy of Design with the Ukrainian born artist, Ivan Olinsky.
