Born in Ukraine, Olitski served in the United States Army during the Second World War. He worked as an artist in Paris, exhibiting with the Cobra group and participating in the art informel movement, and in New York where his relationship with the critic Clement Greenberg placed him amongst some of the most important artist of 20th century America. His large poured, stained and sprayed canvases created diffused fields of colours which had formal similarities to the colour field proponent of Abstract Expressionism.
