The Brooklyn Rail

The first thing you’re thankful for is a bench, because you need a seat when you enter Stanley Whitney’s retrospective. Spread across the entire top floor of the Albright Knox’s new Gundlach extension, the show is organized chronologically, charting the artist’s development from the early seventies through six galleries to the present decade. Great care has been taken with the transitions from gallery to gallery, establishing a narrative that defines breakthrough moments in the artist’s practice. But the chronology is also disrupted; each gallery is hung to offer a new viewing experience. Thus, time is made to fold upon itself, collapsing the deep and recent past to create multiple ways of experiencing Whitney’s creative passages.

The bench in gallery one is positioned for maximum viewing of what feels like the cosmos of Stanley Whitney. To your left and right are important early paintings, but it’s the wall of prints—hung salon style and spanning nearly fifty years—that calls you to your seat. The sense of order and harmony arising from all this variety would seem paradoxical if it weren’t coming from the same hand. There are monotypes, linocuts, silkscreens, and etchings. Some are blocky and colorful; some are colorful tangles; a few are black-and-white and spacious. It is a brilliant curatorial decision because this wall immediately establishes a snapshot of the bigger picture to come. It also engages the first important consideration of Whitney’s oeuvre: the role of printmaking.

It takes but an instant with Whitney’s work to appreciate the value of gesture and line. The quality of active, energized mark-making runs through the show like a current of electricity. It seems to be there from the start, and in a way it was, but it isn’t truly charged until the artist has an epiphany in the printmaking workshop of Robert Blackburn. When he lays ink down on mylar, it retains his touch. This wasn’t happening with his acrylic paintings, and it’s plain to see from the few examples in gallery one. When he returns to the canvas, it’s with oil paint, and the change in the medium makes all the difference. In early oil paintings like Sixteen Songs (1984) there is an immediacy and freshness that is retained, and which never goes away in the paintings that follow.

Another important aspect of Whitney’s engagement with printmaking is its relationship to drawing. Drawing is central to the artist’s practice, and the exhibition makes this point by including well-stocked vitrines of notebooks in multiple galleries. Whether he draws with graphite, crayons, or ink, he does not erase. When a mark is made, it may be responded to, but not unmade. What happens on the page is that the composition develops a coherence that is entirely its own. Pretty quickly the paintings do this, too, and as that starts happening Whitney makes the big shift away from the airy, floating forms in gallery one to the gridded canvases that are now his signature.

Those who make discoveries are always seekers, and those who make breakthroughs are the ones who push, applying pressure to the field or form they wish to transform. Of course, it’s not only a matter of force, but force over time. The energy that comes from that sort of intentionality is simultaneously durational—you sense the commitment, the determination—and as instantaneous as intuition. For years, the artist worked his canvas from the background to the foreground, and then the two zones merged. Kim Conaty, curator of drawings and prints at the Whitney Museum, points out in a superb catalogue essay how Whitney’s work on paper presages this breakthrough on canvas. When the artist talks about drawing as a way to work through struggles, what he’s talking about is the daily rigor of giving complete attention, critical and creative, to a task unburdened by expectation. That sort of effort—to give so much with so little expected in return—can generate feelings of freedom.

It's well documented that trips to Italy and Egypt in the late eighties and early nineties were impactful on the artist. In Italy, the architecture, particularly the Colosseum, the Forum, and the Pantheon, helped Whitney see that “stacking the color” was what he needed to do. In Egypt, amidst the pyramids and hieroglyphs, he picked up on the idea of density—“the last piece of the puzzle,” he told Alteronce Gumby in 2015. At the AKG, this all comes together by the third gallery, and one marvels at how well the curator, Cathleen Chaffee, has laid it out. Guided by Chafee’s curatorial vision, the AKG mounted an earlier exhibition of Whitney’s work—also structured chronologically—in Venice in 2022. That exhibition, The Italian Paintings, focused on the time Whitney spent in Rome and the influence the experience had upon his work. Chaffee is more than knowledgeable; she knows and has written thoughtfully on the artist—her level of engagement allows for subtleties a curator of lesser commitment might overlook.

For example, amidst a set of small, mostly untitled paintings the artist made with leftover paint, there is one from which dangles a small cigar. It’s attached to the painting with a wire and hangs slightly off to the side of the canvas. This peculiar piece was made in collaboration with David Hammons in 1993–94 for an exhibition at Vera Vita Gioia Gallery in Naples. Everything else on the wall is intended to show how the artist adjusts his pace and tempo, moving from the physically demanding larger works to a smaller scale at the end of the day. This painting does more. It speaks to friendship, a class of community apart from the teacher-student relationships that shape so much of the exhibition narrative. With Hammons’s addition of the cigar, the little untitled painting also makes a joke. For an artist who talks about wanting his canvases to breathe—this one would like to smoke.

By the time you reach the fourth and fifth galleries, the principal arc of Whitney’s narrative peaks. The story of a young Black painter from Philadelphia (born in 1946) whose talent is acknowledged and nurtured by mentors including Philip Guston and Al Held; whose fellow students at Yale in the early seventies included Barkley Hendricks, Haim Steinbach, and Judy Pfaff; whose work goes largely unappreciated for decades while he earns a living teaching at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia—the story leads up to Whitney’s biggest canvases and the realization for the viewer that the slow burn of Whitney’s career becomes blazing hot in the new millennium. In 2015, a major exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, Dance the Orange, presented work from 2008–15 and it turned the flames of attention in Whitney’s direction. From then on, he lives with the heat.

A story built upon a series of breakthroughs is also a story about progress and evolution. What happens when the one who seeks at last settles? To look upon Whitney’s large paintings from the last twenty years is to view the artist’s personal Ithaca. He has arrived and, content with his system of composition, is free to give all his attention to that which has always called him: color relationships. It seems like a paradox: by winnowing down decisions about structure and form, he gets to the infinite possibilities of color combinations. Surely the tactility of Whitney’s brushwork remains an active aspect of his surfaces, but it is in the passenger’s position. Color choices drive the paintings forward.

When a painting is six feet across, you can see it clearly from across the room. From a distance, Whitney’s blocks of color appear stable, unmoving. James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo (2008) extends to my peripheral vision, and the orange paint starts to swell. The surface seems to wobble as I try to fix my gaze, but the painting encourages a wandering eye. I focus on Whitney’s transitions from one zone of color to the next. The regularity and repetition of these borderlines is reliable without ever feeling rigid. The looseness and speed one senses in the brushwork of James Brown Sacrifices is exciting. There is a sureness to it, a clear sense of direction and application, even as you feel the intuition of choice and the risky joy of improvisation.

At the conclusion of the exhibition, we’re treated to a small selection from an ongoing series of paintings in which Whitney responds to his friend, the poet Norma Cole. His series is titled “Stay Songs” after her poem, written for him. Throughout the show, the names of poets and musicians appear in titles and notebooks. In one gallery there are more than twenty 12-by-12 paintings lined up, and being the precise size of record jackets, the association with music comes quick. Whitney’s “Stay Songs” are made like these little paintings, fast and at the end of a workday. For the exhibition, the artist recorded himself reading Cole’s poem, so you can view the work as you listen. He reads, “the world is its own music in awe and space and not flat these dynamics of rising … we listen, eye in the hand, mind in the eye of the hand.” Cole’s image unites vision with action and thought; seeing and making and thinking fuse into something singular. It’s the ultimate convergence, a description of creation particular to Whitney but also applicable to those who inspire him, and—I suspect—will be useful to those who draw inspiration from his life’s work.