Over a period of several years and through the generosity of the artist and a series of committed donors, the David Winton Bell Gallery has acquired nineteen paintings and one sculpture by Jules Olitski. Born in Russia in 1922, Olitski came to the United States as a child. He studied at various institutions, including the National Academy of Design in New York and New York University, as well as in Paris. While in Paris, Olitski worked to find his independent artistic voice.   He painted blindfolded in order to undo his early training in the Old Masters techniques. The artist made his first stain paintings in the early sixties, then during the spring of 1964, he developed the spray painting technique with which he is most closely identified. It was through these stained and sprayed canvases of the sixties that Olitski began to redefine contemporary painting. Now recognized as one of the masters of color-field painting, he is credited with creating a new form of painting in which color is no longer bound to either representational or strictly abstract form.

The works in the Bell Gallery collection demonstrate the major phases of Olitski's development during the critical period of the sixties and early seventies. Mauve Game, 1960, is one of his earliest abstract works. As pointed out by Kenworth Moffett, these early abstractions were based on photographs of female nudes. By 1962, Olitski was producing paintings of stained color on raw canvas.  Sacred Courtesan Blue, 1962, and Half Chinese Patutsky, 1964, explore compositions with circular shapes that utlize areas of raw canvas. From 1963, Olitski created works such as Red Round, which introduced larger areas of color, where the paint forms a kind of "curtain" on the canvas. Red Round, like many of these works contrast large areas of intense color with smaller circles or shapes on the edge or in the corner of the painting.

In the late 60s, Olitski experimented with spray painting techniques. He is said to have remarked that an ideal situation would be to spray color in the air and have it remain there. His Yellow Volya, from 1969, is among numerous works made throughout the seventies, that has large areas of sprayed on color. According to Clement Greenberg, these works created a "new kind of paint surface," which is grainy and although mostly a single hue, creates an illusion of depth. Olitski's large expanses of color are often complicated with small borders of color, or edges, and continue the earlier interest in contrasting shapes.

Olitski's work has continued to evolve. In the nineties the artist returned to more representational works. Ancient Sea from 1996 is part of a series of mystical sunrise and sunset landscapes. Inspired by a Delacroix landscape some are more representational then others, while all demonstrate the artist's interest in rich and meaningful color schemes.