Acquisition Highlight
This page features the stories behind two notable new collections that were recently added to the Archives. To learn more about how the Archives acquires collections, see Donating Papers.
The Paul Jenkins Papers
 Paul Jenkins in his New York study reading 1950s correspondence with dealer Zoe Dusanne. Photo by Suzanne Donnelly Jenkins. | “I was extremely interested by your paintings last night, they greatly impressed me and my friend Jean Paulhan, who accompanied me, liked them very much too. I only regret that the room was completely filled with people, these obligations to engage in conversations as soon as one sets foot in a gallery are very annoying. I prefer silence! Your paintings speak well enough on their own and should incite the public to keep silent.” -Jean Dubuffet to Paul Jenkins, April 9, 1954 on the occasion of Jenkins’ first solo exhibition at Studio Facchetti, Paris. Paul Jenkins Papers. In December, 2007, the Archives of American Art acquired the Paul Jenkins Papers. The first segment contains more than 4,600 documents, primarily correspondence with colleagues from the 1940s to the present, such as Norman Bluhm, Beauford Delaney, Mark Tobey, Matsumi Kanemitsu, Jean Dubuffet, Willem de Kooning, Elaine de Kooning, Alice Baber, Lee Krasner, Michael Goldberg, Philippe Hosiasson, Joan Mitchell, Dore Ashton, Clement Greenberg, Thomas B. Hess, Frank O’Hara, Martha Jackson and David Douglas Duncan. |
The collection also includes rich and extensive correspondence with the art dealer Zoe Dusanne, art historians Frank Trapp, Albert Elsen, and Kenneth Sawyer, and correspondence and related documents reflecting the artist's involvement with the theater as both playwright and designer. Additionally, more than 650 outgoing letters from Jenkins are preserved in copies, offering researchers a complete record of the dialogue between the artist and his contemporaries. The Paul Jenkins papers serve as an extensive resource on the life and career of Jenkins, who has worked at the nexus of both American and Parisian avant-garde circles, as well as at the forefront of modern movements which have embraced both the dynamism of action painting and spiritual explorations into Eastern mysticism. On the occasion of donating his papers to the Archives, Jenkins reflected: The past remains in the present or to put it in another way, the past can offer up crucial revelations. Past, present and future can become one and the same. Much of the artist's life is a secret or a mystery and this material that I have held onto is not only related to my past but to a time. And it is this time that is revealed. Forthcoming additions to the Paul Jenkins Papers will include correspondence from the 1940s, the artist’s diaries and notebooks, and images and documentation corresponding to Jenkins’ artistic output and exhibition history. Biographical Note: Paul Jenkins (b. 1923) entered the Art Students League in 1948, where he studied under Yasuo Kuniyoshi. By 1953, Jenkins was pouring paint on canvas to achieve a dense viscosity of impacted color. Today the paintings of Paul Jenkins represent the spirit, vitality, and invention of post-World War II American abstraction, and the painter’s fame is as much identified with the process of controlled paint-pouring and canvas manipulation as with the gem-like veils of transparent and translucent color which have characterized his work. Jenkins lives and works in New York City. Donated in 2007 by Paul Jenkins. With special thanks to the outstanding efforts and dedication of his wife Suzanne Donnelly Jenkins. Also in the Archives: | |
Oral History Interview in Focus: Patti Warashina
 Patti Warashina workshop, ca. 1970. Photo from the Patti Warashina Papers. | Ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina (b. l940) received her Bachelor’s and Master’s of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Washington. Her work is best known for satire, humor, and dream state figures, expressed through low-fire polychrome clay. Together with Robert Sperry (whom she married in 1976), Howard Kottler and Fred Bauer, she brought national recognition to the department of ceramics at the University of Washington’s School of Art in the late l970s. Patti Warashina was interviewed for the Archives of American Art by Doug Jeck at the artist’s home and studio in Seattle, Washington on September 8, 2005. In the interview, Warashina discusses her childhood in Spokane as the youngest of three children of Japanese immigrants; early experiences with art in elementary and high school; her great-grandmother, who sold pottery and rice from a cart in her native Japan; spending early years working in “a vacuum”—raising a family by day and working in the studio at night; her teaching career; her mother as role model; being a self-proclaimed “news junkie” and listening to jazz while she works. Regarding her approach and influences, Warashina discusses moving from high-fire to low-fire glazes, as well as dealing with color and decoration in her work; the challenge of making increasingly larger pieces; learning how to make hand-built pieces and how to control clay; the difference between her early and later work, which she calls “cumulative process;” and the influence of Surrealism, Funk art, and the Hairy Who, as well as Hieronymous Bosch, René Magritte and Joan Miró on her ceramics. Warashina also describes her recent undertakings, including the Mile Post Queens and Sake Sets: The Drunken Power Series, and recalls Robert Sperry, Fred Bauer, Peter Voulkos, Robert Arneson, Toshiko Takaezu, Henry Takemoto, Garth Clark, Howard Cotler, Matthew Kangas, Warren MacKenzie, Nan McKinnell, Bernard Leach, Shoji Hamada, Soetsu Yanagi, among others. |
Interview Excerpt: ….MR. JECK: So do you make a distinction in your mind between pots and sculpture that is made out of clay? The entire Transcript of the Patti Warashina Interview is available online. This interview is part of the Archives’ Nanette L. Laitman Documentation Project for Craft and Decorative Arts in America. To date, 140 interviews have been conducted for the Laitman Project. Also in the Archives: Learn more:
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