The Splintered Beauty of Jack Whitten’s Paintings

I need a new word. The trouble with calling these works ‘paintings’ is that the term cannot convey or contain what Jack Whitten was doing with paint. The pieces on view in ‘The Messenger’ – Whitten’s retrospective at MoMA – exceed painting: they reach past the medium, live beyond its edges. In these paintings-that-exceed-painting, we find a study of movement and physics; a discourse on photo theory; a language and a philosophy of language; a music. Above all, we find ourselves with inquiry, within ongoing and open questions. Throughout the show, surprises lie everywhere in wait. How delightful it is to be gripped and renewed by them.

The force of this unpredictability is immediate: next to the entrance of the first gallery are Whitten’s ‘grey paintings’ from 1964, his attempt to wade through the pained psychic waters that followed the explosion of anti-Black brutality in the early sixties. Here, the artist streaked black and white paint over a canvas, pressed a mesh cloth over the painted surface and then used a scraper to sweep away the resulting excess paint. What emerges is a blur of uncanny ambiguity and quiet violence: in Head IV Lynching, for example, a spectral figure appears to haunt the canvas from underneath its surface, streaking it with a fulguration of anguished motion. From the ingenuity of technical experiment rises a convulsion of affect, a pathos that writhes and roils.

This is the gift of ‘The Messenger’: we witness time and again the artist’s openness to surprising not only his viewers but also himself through an unflinching insistence on metamorphosis. Whitten constantly invented new risks for himself, followed his materials over the edge of experimentation and leapt with them toward the not-yet-known. In his studio log (later published as Jack Whitten: Notes from the Woodshed, 2018), he wrote of his paintings: ‘It is impossible for me to control them. Sometimes I wonder who or what is doing the controlling.’ In surrendering to his materials, Whitten accrued a profound understanding of their inner workings and of how they could be worked in turn. We see this in displays featuring the curious devices that Whitten used to manipulate paint: afro-picks; drawing tools assembled by affixing myriad pencils to cardboard; a rake he called ‘the developer’.

An entire gallery (and then some) is dedicated to the ‘slab’ paintings made with this latter device, which Whitten would use to move pools of acrylic paint across the canvas in a single gesture. For Whitten, the decisiveness of this movement evoked the precision and immediacy of photography – hence the name ‘the developer’, a reference to darkroom photography. The artist wanted to replicate with acrylic the instantaneous opening and closing of the camera shutter, the shock of light penetrating the aperture. Such is Whitten’s astonishing command of paint: he could use it to get underneath the skin of an entirely different medium.

As much as they are exercises in light, the ‘slab’ paintings are also experiments in music. They take after John Coltrane, whom Whitten met in 1965; his talk of ‘sheets of sound’ motivated Whitten to describe his paintings as ‘sheets of light’. Injected with the clarity of Coltrane’s sound, Whitten wrote in Notes from the Woodshed: ‘YOU GOTTA BE ABLE TO THINK LIKE COLTRANE TO DO WHAT I AM DOING IN PAINTING: THE LIGHT EXIST IN SHEETS, JUST LIKE COLTRANE TOLD ME’. In the smooth rush of chroma in paintings like Tripping and Russian Speedway (both 1971), one can feel the glide and drive of this lucid musicality: their surfaces bear the sustained tension of a held note. But there are also syncopated notes in the acrylic, wonderful accents of friction that interrupt the paint’s travel, resisting cohesion with sparks of contingency.

In later galleries, we see Whitten’s horizons of invention continue to widen with an artist residency at Xerox Corporation in Rochester. There, he began various experiments with photocopier toner and toner powder: in Xerox Project (1974), he scrapes toner on paper and fixes it with heat lamps, generating folds of geometric abstraction. In Dispersal A #1, 'A' #2 and 'B' #4 (all 1971), we witness again his commitment to the fugaciousness of his materials, to painting itself as movement. Here, the artist deploys Rhoplex AC-33, a moisture-resistant acrylic adhesive used in art restoration. Whitten applied Rhoplex to paper, added dry pigment to create a suspension and then deposited drops of water, causing the pigment to skate across the surface. The marbled patterning that results is amorphous yet imagistic, equally suggestive of aerial topography, light microscopy or the murmuration of birds.

In the final galleries, we encounter aspects of Whitten that feel more familiar to me. One room features several of his ‘Greek Alphabet’ paintings (1975–78). Whitten embarked on these abstractions after spending numerous summers in Greece, where he would make sculptures, some of which are shown in the gallery. Marked with curves, circles and geometric abstractions which are layered atop nearly illusory Agnes Martin-esque lines, the alphabet paintings are evasive, tricky like their maker. Though they are titled after letters in the Greek alphabet, the shapes on their surfaces have little to do with the morphology of the titular letters. Yet Whitten’s mark-making is unquestionably redolent of the most irreducible elements of writing, suggesting a schema of graphemes and glyphs. We are left suspended in the semiotic indeterminacy between writing and its fundament, between an alphabet and its deformation.

Then, at last, the splintered beauty of the mosaic paintings, those final flourishes of experimentation with acrylic. To make these paintings, Whitten would dry up paint and then break it apart into tiny pieces which he called tesserae. From there, he would reassemble these fragments into a kind of incoherent totality. These swarms of brokenness tell of an uncompromising commitment to abundance, a willingness to thread together a plenum from the shards of things. There is also a sense of aliveness: for these assemblages have a pulse, they move to the buckled rhythm of the tesserae’s oscillations between surface and depth, texture and smoothness. In Sixth Gestalt (The Seamstress) (1992), we find a drama of pixellated colour akin to the measured vibrations of television static. Elsewhere, the charred topography of Black Monolith X (The Birth of Muhammad Ali) (2016) evokes both the effulgent swirls of the cosmos and the dense, geological roughness of the earth.

I linger for a long time at one of the final paintings, Atopolis (For Édouard Glissant) (2014), tracing with my gaze the proliferating lines of flight made from silver tesserae, punctuated with pearlescent blues and purples. The title of this painting, so aptly dedicated to the Martiniquais philosopher of errantry and relation, is assembled from the Greek words for ‘no place’ and ‘city’. Later, I read in Notes from the Woodshed: ‘TO CONSTRUCT SOMETHING + THEN PROCEED TO DECONSTRUCT IT. THE PROCESS OF CONSTRUCT + DECONSTRUCT IS TRANSCENDED THROUGH RECONSTRUCTION.’ This is the sublimity of Whitten’s pursuit in Atopolis and in so many of his mosaics: we find at once poiesis and anapoiesis, worlding and unworlding, a mapping of place and a release into placelessness. Indeed, the very key to Whitten’s work may be this irresolvability, and he’s not asking us to make sense of it. Just dwell there.

Jack Whitten, ‘The Messenger’ is on view at MoMA, New York until 2 August

^{Main image: Jack Whitten. Mirsinaki Blue (detail), 1974, acrylic on canvas, 158 × 183 cm. Collection of the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University. Courtesy: © 2024 Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University}