Paul Jenkins
Poured and tilted paint across the canvas with an ivory knife, and let gravity do the drawing.
Paul Jenkins was born in Kansas City in 1923, worked as a boy in a ceramics factory where he watched glazes pour, and studied at the Art Students League after wartime service. From the mid-1950s, dividing his life between New York and Paris, he arrived at the method he kept: acrylic or oil poured onto raw or primed canvas and steered by tilting the stretcher and by an ivory knife, producing veils and prisms of transparent colour with hard, sharp edges where two flows meet. Almost every work is titled Phenomena, followed by a phrase. He died in New York in 2012.
A market spread between America, France and Asia, led by the large canvases from the 1960s and 1970s. Watercolours on paper using the same pouring method are numerous and are a substantial part of what trades, and they are acutely sensitive to light, with fading a common and value-determining problem. Because the paint is poured onto absorbent grounds and is often unvarnished, surface staining and water damage are effectively irreversible. Canvases are usually signed on the face and titled and dated on the reverse.
If you own a work by Paul Jenkins
Send photographs and whatever paperwork came with it. The first question is what the work actually is — edition or unique, when, and in what condition — because everything else follows from the answer. A valuation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.
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Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.