Stanley Whitney, Trailblazer and Rule-Breaker, Gets a Fabulous Retrospective at Long Last
Photo Brenda Bieger, Buffalo AKG Art Museum
By design, grids are cold, ordered, inflexible, unfeeling things. In most cases, their rigorous systems leave little room for creativity. “It is what art looks like when it turns its back on nature,” art historian Rosalind Krauss famously wrote in “Grids,” her 1979 essay about the format.
But in the hands of painter Stanley Whitney, the rules of the grid exist to be subverted. Irregular squares of Day-Glo green, neon red, dandelion yellow, cyan blue, and other hues are stacked against one another, forming off-kilter rows of varying sizes. They have always looked to me a bit like melting Neapolitan ice cream—if the dessert contained far more flavors than vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry, that is.
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Look closely, and the sense of order falls apart. Some forms are thinly, messily painted, while others are pristine and perfect. Some areas drip, sending droplets across the rows, while others provide partial views of swatches of color hidden beneath the surface. Some rows, separated by bands of color, are not even necessarily rows. Really, they are odd gatherings of beautiful shapes that hum with a nervous energy.
These grids have not turned their back on nature. They’ve opened themselves to the chaos of life itself.
Whitney is now the subject of a sprawling retrospective at New York’s Buffalo AKG Art Museum, where several galleries devoted to these grids form this fabulous show’s grand finale. Yet the show, curated by Cathleen Chaffee, makes a convincing case that this 77-year-old painter is more than his grids, which have become his calling card since he began making them more than 20 years ago.
The show proves that Whitney has reworked motifs continuously, much as a composer develops a theme across movements of a symphony. His grids have their roots in a previous body of work composed of lined-up circles. Those circles, in turn, were thrown out of alignment and allowed to hang loose in a series of paintings ahead of that. And before there were circles, there were even less definable forms.
Across all these paintings, Whitney has chafed against rigid systems, exposing what happens when logic comes apart. Take Pleasure or Joy (1994), one of the circle paintings, in which balls of tangled paint strokes are set side by side, forming four sequences. As one’s eye moves down the painting, the circles become misshapen rectangles; rivulets of indigo, orange, and mint green flow toward the bottom, traversing multiple strata. Whitney has flouted the very laws which he has set down for himself, and if the title is any indication, he has found ecstasy in the process.
It’s worth remembering what was in vogue when Whitney started making his abstractions, during the ’70s. Serious New York artists were not supposed to paint—Minimalist sculpture, Conceptualist photography, and heady performance art were the preferred modes of production. And if artists did put brush to canvas, they were meant to subject their materials to mathematical systems or conceptual rubrics. Whitney, in his own sly way, seems to pushed against all that.
He did try his hand at process-based abstraction. The Buffalo show opens with an untitled 1972 work featuring several tapeworm-like forms cavorting amid a crusty green background. Done in acrylic and made by pushing the paint around with a mop (à la Ed Clark, who used a broom to make his abstractions), this rarely seen work was the first that Whitney deemed a true success. That same year, he had graduated from Yale’s MFA program, and before that, he had dodged the Vietnam War draft by attending art school, studied with Philip Guston and Robert Reed, and worked at the famed Pearl Paint store in New York. It took many false starts before he got to this point.
Among those false starts was one as a figurative painter. His representational paintings—unfortunately relegated to the catalogue, and not in the show itself—are mysterious images of people whose forms dissolve in and out of their backgrounds. They owe a debt to his French forbears, namely Paul Cézanne and Chaim Soutine, and while these are mostly failed experiments, they tick because they are so odd. Whitney’s first major foray into abstraction, by contrast, is much more calculated, much less free, and for that reason doesn’t strike me as being so successful.
But Whitney has hashed out his ideas on paper—the AKG retrospective thankfully does not discount these pieces—and his drawings of the late ’70s are the work of an artist whose practice is in transition. Dashes of ink are arrayed so that they appear to dance, forming arrangements that look like flocks of birds in permanent motion. Then, in other works, black splotches appear to cover grids altogether, as though Whitney were actively warding off Minimalism.
Just as sculptors have traditionally scaled up their maquettes to produce larger pieces, Whitney seems to have translated ideas from paper to canvas. His black splotches, for example, are colorized in paintings done at the turn of the decade. In Sixteen Songs (1984), clumps of butter yellow and black strokes are struck through with dashes of paint. Whitney, ever the dazzling formalist, creates a sense of depth without the use of shadows. Sometimes, his orbs appear to float before the horizontal strokes; other times, his dashes appear to be in front, with globules behind them. The relationship between background and foreground—one of those basic things taught in art school as being integral to painting—is profoundly unsettled.
In his paintings of ’90s, inspired by his travels in the American West and abroad, the circles are more tightly packed together. Their dense positioning evokes figures seen in ancient processional paintings in Egypt and rows of columns at temples in Rome. But it is the looser works, like By Whatever Means Necessary (1992), that burn the brightest. At its center, this work contains a blue scrawl that encroaches upon the black band separating its row. That title, importantly, is a fragment from a quote often attributed to the civil rights activist Malcolm X, who believed violence to be a necessary strategy for Black liberation.
To what extent are Whitney’s works political? The assembly of works in the Buffalo show does include some pieces that are explicit in their evocation of anti-Black racism and real-world strife. There’s one paper torn from a sketchbook that’s painted with a poignant missive: “Hey Jimmy. Ain’t you heard? RACE + ART Are far apart.” It’s a quotation from the poet Langston Hughes to the writer James Baldwin.
There are also deeply affecting recent works that bear out a prison abolitionist sentiment, something Whitney has voiced in his lesser-seen works on paper for several decades. One 2020 watercolor features a grid-like composition, with each cell filled in by a smear of paint. Should there be any doubt that this is meant to represent a penitentiary, Whitney also has also written in pencil, “I will say it again … NO to prison life.”
The “again” is telling. If grids can be considered forms of confinement, Whitney has repeatedly sought liberation from them. Even when his paintings do not broadcast their politics, they have always been engaged in that project.
Many artists have taken up similar themes, though few have privileged beauty in the process. Whitney’s paintings pop because of their Matissean colors and, in some cases, their vast scale. Nowhere is that more than case than in the show’s sole new work, a 2024 painting made up of slabs of mustard yellow, pale maroon, carrot orange, and more. The composition is both delicious and awkward—its rectangles slant askew ever so gently, and its gorgeous hues mismatched.
At 10 feet wide, this painting feels like a universe unto itself, one that is torn from the strictures of our own. Its title: As Wild as the World, an allusion, perhaps, to the fact that art can reshape everything around us.
Correction, 2/15/24, 12:50 p.m.: A previous version of this article misstated the name of the show’s new work. It is As Wild as the World, not As Wide as the World.
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