“I don’t have any color theory. The color is magic, and I want the work to be magic. I lay a color down and that color calls another color, and then it’s a balancing act. You don’t want to have something dominate something else, and you want to have good transitions.”
E xecuted in 2013, Red, Green, Black, Blues seems to pulsate with an internal rhythm as Stanley Whitney revels in a visual symphony evocative of an unconstrained jazz improvisation. The present work belongs to Whitney’s highly celebrated series of color grid paintings, which simultaneously embrace the freedom of color and the order of the grid. As colors emerge and recede, expand and contract, they define space on their own terms rather than through perspective or traditional figure-ground relationships. Squares in multiple tonalities of cerulean, ultramarine, phthalo green, with cadmium red and orange, draw attention to the pulsing playful interplay existing within each of the elements. Executed on a large scale and presented in Whitney’s iconic square canvas, Red, Green, Black, Blues presents an exceptional example of the artist’s most archetypal format and celebrated style.
The grand scale of the present work and its enveloping all-over composition that seems to explode with color reflects the advancements of the Abstract Expressionist and color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock. Whitney’s work is undoubtedly informed by an internal pressure to synthesize the manifold influences of art history and his predecessors. Describing this ambition, Whitney said “I wanted something as open as Pollock but as structured as Mondrian. That was a big distance I was trying to work in, that space between those two artists. Which covers a lot of ground, a lot of possibilities” (Stanley Whitney quoted in: Alteronce Gumby, “Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby,” BOMB, 21 April 2015, online). Whitney’s grid paintings are thus filled with an exquisite tension as the gestural strokes and gentle drips contradict the structure of the grid.
RIGHT: Mark Rothko, No. 1 (Royal Red and Blue), 1954, sold at Sotheby’s New York, 13 November 2012.
As a young black artist in the 1970s and 80s, Whitney was confronted with the expectations of African American artists to contend with themes of racial and cultural identity. Avoiding the demands of his day to make politically engaged, figurative work that was explicitly about the black experience, Whitney instead explored the visual language of abstraction, formulating what would become his signature grid composition.
“As much as I read, I wasn’t a storyteller and I didn’t really want to have issues of black and white, which I called the family feud of black and white Americans…When I saw Mark Rothko and Morris Louis, I felt that I was home, that was just who I was. I just embraced that, stuck to it and believed in that.”
And yet Whitney does not entirely leave his heritage out of his artistic process, having described his compositions as similar to the call and response flow of traditional African-American music, with one color calling forth another and dictating the structure of the work. Like a jazz soloist, Whitney improvises spontaneously juxtaposing warm and cool, loud and soft, to ultimately create a work of arresting chromatic complexity.
A contemporary master of painting, Stanley Whitney’s creations grace the most prominent collections including the Solomon Guggenheim Museum; the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Long Museum; and the Palazzo Magnani, with recent solo exhibitions in Gagosian, Rome; Lisson Gallery, London, and New York; Galerie Nordenhake in Berlin and Sweden, among many other venues. Recently, Whitney was honored with a solo exhibition at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi in Venice in correspondence with the 2022 Venice Biennale.
