Worth a Look: Stanley Whitney at the Walker

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"Worth a Look" is a series of semi-regular essays about excellent art, interesting ideas, and whatever other cool stuff we find around town. Go see art; it's good for you.

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I’ve never been wild about those lines of tape that museums put on the floor, the ones that mark off the artworks. I get their necessity, I respect their boundaries, and I value their vigilance in dissuading an overeager public from damaging the goods. You can certainly see a painting just fine from a foot or two away. But still, I always want to get right up on the thing. To make a work of art is to be intimately engaged with its surface, leaving only a matter of inches — if that — between the artwork and the artist. That’s where I want to be as a viewer: nose to nose, inspecting all the drips and bumps and brushstrokes that make a piece come alive or, sometimes, allow it to fall flat.

My first impression of Stanley Whitney’s work, however, came on Instagram, which is the equivalent of standing at the other end of the room. Since his retrospective How High the Moon opened at the Walker Art Center last month, people have been sharing photos of the work, reducing his six foot or larger canvases down to the two and a half inch scale of my phone screen. Even from that great and digital distance, I was immediately transfixed. Whitney’s gorgeous, sumptuous, saturated blocks of color convey a profound liveliness in spite of their simplicity. There’s no reason these paintings should be this good, but I couldn’t get them out of my head. I was eager to visit the work in person to see if it held up.

 

Stanley Whitney, That's Rome, 2019. Oil on linen. Collection of Kelly and Gerry Pasciucco. All photos by Russ White.

 

By accident, I took the show in backwards, though I don’t think it makes much difference. The first and final rooms are filled with Whitney’s signature abstract oils — large, haphazardly painted colors stacked within each composition like a wall of opaque windows. You see them first from the doorway, at Instagram distance, and the colors stare right back at you with a confident, joyful clarity.

Try this when you go: lock eyes with one of the paintings and slowly move towards it. Pay attention to how the work changes as the distance narrows. The closer you get, the more Whitney’s firm blocks of color dissolve in spots into discernible, fluid brushstrokes. The solidity of his lines start to shake. The sturdy architecture of each composition grows a little flimsy, and his ice cream colors drip and sag and wobble as they rub up against each other. At a certain point, the edges of each section start to crackle with energy. When you get all the way up to that gray line on the floor, as face to face as we’re allowed to be, you can see the man’s decisions and his confidence and, oddly, his humor. There’s something funny about these paintings. In a segment on CBS This Morning about the show’s first iteration at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, reporter Alino Cho asks the artist, “What do you hope people will feel when they look at your work?”

“Better,” he says, with a chuckle.

Mondrian is the most obvious stylistic precedent here, even down to the way some of Whitney's lines halt abruptly before reaching the canvas's edge. “I always wanted my work to be like Mondrian, you know, step by step,” he says in one of the audio snippets linked on the wall labels, describing how he builds up layers of paint. One small black and white drawing in the show even reads as a direct reference to Mondrian's famous series of trees, painted more and more abstractly on his way towards clean geometry. You’ll likely also catch hints of Mark Rothko’s sublime color fields or Sean Scully’s ominous stripes and grids, although Whitney’s work feels more buoyantly alive than either. You might get a little Wayne Thiebaud, too, particularly in the rapturous creams and blues of a painting like Undestructable Hymn.

 

Top: Stanley Whitney, Undestructable Hymn, 2001. Oil on linen. Private collection. Bottom: Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 1978. Ink on paper, private collection.

 

But to me, the closest cousin to these paintings might be Philip Guston for the paint-handling alone. Whitney had Guston as a mentor in the late ‘60s, and the same sort of thick fussiness with which Guston painted both his abstractions and his Klansmen has a kinship to the messy borders of Whitney’s beautiful blocks. They're a little cartoony, a little rumpled, almost like a worn suit. Nothing too perfect, but balanced just right. These paintings are so good.

In the middle of the exhibition, the show expands into a trove of smaller studies and sketchbook pages, and you get a sense of an artist obsessed with his craft, working out how to contain all of life within a rectangle. Containment itself seems to be a driving element — even his earlier, free-floating blobs of the 1980s respect the canvas’s boundaries.

 

Top: Installation view. Middle: Stanley Whitney, Untitled, 2020. Monotype in watercolor and crayon on Lanaquarelle paper. Bottom: Stanley Whitney, Portrait of a Dream, 1983. Oil on canvas. Collection of Jay Ptashek and Karen Elizaga, courtesy Front Desk Apparatus.

 

I’m reminded of the Keith Haring retrospective the Walker hosted earlier this year. The great tragedy of that exhibition, despite its expansiveness, was its brevity — Haring was only able to work for about twelve years before we lost him to AIDS. The main question I walked out of that show with was how he was able to paint the same imagery over and over and over again — the dancer, the dog, the UFO, and all the rest of his iconography — without getting bored. And here, in Stanley Whitney, we have another artist who has kept himself interested in a very specific line of inquiry for 40+ years. That he found enough room to move inside these blocks for that length of time is amazing. But then again, nobody wonders why portraitists spend a lifetime painting faces. “The whole thing,” Whitney says in another audio clip, “was how to make color a subject matter.”

 

Stanley Whitney, Untitled (Hey Jimmy), 1990. Crayon on paper.

 

On one wall, mixed in with a bunch of other sketches and small works is a framed page torn from a sketchbook colorfully recreating a postcard Langston Hughes sent to James Baldwin in 1962: “Hey Jimmy, Ain’t you heard? Race and art are far apart.” This is not an artist who hid inside abstraction to avoid the world outside; this is an artist who listens to that world and speaks back in color. Stacked stone antiquities, Gee’s Bend quilts, the loose rhythms and wild depths of jazz, soul, and blues — all are evident in these big, simple, complicated pictures.

As with the tape on the floor, I’m not a huge fan of year-end best-of lists either. I see their purpose, but they always leave so much out, particularly when the big venues overshadow smaller galleries that deserve just as much recognition. But I have to say that How High the Moon is one of the best shows I’ve seen in a long time. Go in with your eyes open, get as close as you can, and see if those colors and lines and big wobbly blocks don’t come to life for you as well. ◼︎ 

 

Stanley Whitney, James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, 2008. Oil on linen. Private collection.

 

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon is on view at the Walker Art Center through March 16, 2025. The exhibition was curated by Cathleen Chaffee, the Charles Balbach Chief Curator at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Walker Coordinating Curators: Pavel Pyś, Curator of Visual Arts and Collections Strategy, Walker Art Center; with Laurel Rand-Lewis, Curatorial Fellow, Visual Arts.

To see more work and learn more about the artist, visit gagosian.com or follow him on Instagram @stanley.whitney.