PAUL JENKINS     (1923-2012)

Born in Kansas City, Paul Jenkins began his studies at Kansas City Art Institute and subsequently spent four years studying with Japanese-American artist Yasuo Kuniyoshi in New York City.
His first solo exhibitions were held at Studio Paul Facchetti in Paris in 1954 and the Martha Jackson Gallery in New York City in 1956, a leading gallery of the time. The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York purchased one of Jenkins’s paintings from this exhibition.
In the '50s, Jenkins achieved prominence both in New York and Europe for his early abstractions. Peggy Guggenheim  started collecting Paul Jenkins’s artworks in 1959, having purchased a painting directly from his studio in Paris.
Notably, he was also the object of the admiration of the members of Japanese avant-garde group Gutai. In 1958 Jenkins was invited by Gutai’s leader Jiro Yoshihara to work with Gutai in Japan, but it was not until 1964 that Jenkins accepted to become artist in residence at the Gutai Pinacotheca in Osaka.
Considered to be part of the second wave of Abstract Expressionism, Jenkins rather defined himself as "an Abstract Phenomenist." His production springs from a wide range of eclectic influences, including meditative Buddhism and ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy; Jenkins’s knowledge of Jung’s psychoanalytic theory, Kant’s philosophy and Goethe’s color theory was as influential for his practice as were meetings with architect Frank Lloyd Wright and fellow painters Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman.
Over the past 50 years, numerous retrospectives have been curated across the globe and Jenkins’s artworks can be found in Museums in Europe, the United States and Asia.