Art: Color It Color

Nudes also interest Abstractionist Jules Olitski but mainly as an excuse to keep his draftsmanship in shape. Ever so often, a nude model poses for him while he, Critic Clement Greenberg and a couple of friends sketch from life. When Olitski settles down to serious painting, he turns out tinted canvases whose miragelike effects derive from the absence, indeed the positive negation, of the penciled line in any shape or form (see opposite)

"I want the logic of color," says the artist, "to be the structure of my paintings, to open them up, to make...