Paul Jenkins’s work is a mainstay of mid-season sales of Contemporary art, especially at Sotheby’s in New York. Now the painter who befriended Pollack and Rothko after moving to New York in the 1940s has died at

His work attracted collectors and museums in the United States, but he had a stronger following in Europe, where, with his flowing hair and beard — a friend said he looked like Charlton Heston’s Moses — he seemed to embody an old-fashioned archetype of the avant-garde artist. In a 2009 review of work from the 1960s and ’70s, Roberta Smith wrote in The Times that Mr. Jenkins’s paintings were “more a popular idea of abstract art than the real thing” and “too gorgeous for their own good.”

Paul Jenkins, Painter of Abstract Art Work, Dies at 88 (New York Times)