“[Stanley Whitney] has energized abstraction for himself and others by using saturated color and the Modernist grid for their mutual reinvention. In so doing, he has devised an improvisatory, enriched Minimalism, whose hard edges, ruled lines and predetermined systems have been loosened and destabilized, whose colors are more random — all of which gives the viewer an immense amount to look at and mull over.”
Belonging to Stanley Whitney’s celebrated color grid series in which the artist explores both the visual and conceptual capabilities of color, Morning Moment is a dynamic and iconic example of the artist’s acclaimed practice. A rhythmic mash-up of reds, blues, yellows, and greens, the present work embodies Whitney’s career-long commitment to his own personal tenants of abstraction, guided by a longstanding process which has changed little over the past three decades. Writing about Whitney’s unique artistic process, acclaimed critic Roberta Smith explains, “Mr. Whitney’s system is flexible and simple: On square canvases, he arranges sturdy blocks of singing color into vibrant grids, without benefit of straight edge, reinforcing them with at least three horizontal bands. When these bands match the blocks, space is altered by the effect of banners hanging from ribbons. These grids are always irregular, and slivers of color often intrude from the edges, implying other blocks that might yet slide into view, creating a different arrangement” (Roberta Smith, “Review: Stanley Whitney’s Paintings Reinvent the Grid”, The New York Times, 16 July 2015, online).
Image © Museum of Modern Art, New York
Art © 022 Mondrian/Holtzman Trust / Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York
At once liberated and ordered, Whitney has likened his expressive grid-like compositions to the vibrancy and “madness” of New York: “I never think about the structure as a grid—though it is a grid, really. I’m a real New York City painter, if you know what I mean. My paintings are just the way New York is. I want that kind of simplicity, which is also the madness of New York, because of the color. So you have this contradiction, in a sense. There’s the grid, which should be very orderly, and then you put the color, and it throws the whole thing off.” (Stanley Whitney, quoted in Alteronce Gumby, “Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby”, BOMB, 21 April 2015, online).
This relationship to the urban landscape of New York City, as well as Whitney’s geometric and colorful compositional approach, harken to the early modernist abstractions of Piet Mondrian, in particular the artist’s late works such as Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942-43) which similarly pulsate with color and rhythm and were inspired by the artist's arrival in New York. However, whereas Mondrian had implemented a starkly defined grid which separated the blocks of color in his work, Whitney’s blocks of color bleed into one another, resisting the traditional notions of geometric abstract painting and instead drawing parallels to Color field painters such as Mark Rothko and Sam Gilliam.
Image © Museum of Modern Art, New York
Art © 2022 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society (Ars), New York
Moreover, there is an underlying relationship between Whitney’s practice and Jackson Pollock’s: both artists embrace spontaneity, with Whitney choosing his colors in the moment and according to his emotions, and Pollock building his compositions almost entirely from impulse and intuition. Furthermore, both artists achieve an “all-over” composition which draws the viewer's attention to every corner of the canvas. Explaining his spontaneous approach, Whitney says, “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.” Indeed, the rhythmicality of works such as Morning Moment reflects the artist’s love of jazz, another parallel to modern masters such as Mondrian and Pollock: “Painting, for me, is like music. It really is like call and response. A color calls another color” (Stanley Whitney quoted in: Alteronce Gumby, “Oral History Project: Stanley Whitney by Alteronce Gumby,” BOMB, 21 April 2015, online).
“I always had the color. I don’t know where it came from. My influences are many, from Titian to Edvard Munch to textiles, and the color comes from all kinds of places. Sometimes I go for a walk and I am looking for a yellow but I can’t find it in the world so I go back to my studio with a specific hue in mind. For a long time, my difficulty was how to make color the subject because the way we were taught is that color supports content.”
Speaking in more detail about the intersection of music, art, and race, Whitney explains, “So much of my color resembles music, something that is intrinsically difficult to address in language. Jazz is misunderstood in the United States, but a friend expressed it best when he said, “When Charlie Parker came to Stockholm, he liberated the city.” We take jazz for granted as an American expression, but the intellect in music is hard to discern… Similarly, African American art is typically understood as depictions of the body and not the intellect. Even today, it is a fight to be an abstract artist. A fight to be outside of blackness… Skin color remains, culture remains, but what does that look like—being outside of blackness as an artist, not being white and just being human?” (Stanley Whitney quoted in: Andrianna Campbell, “Interview with Stanley Whitney”, Artforum, 2015, Online)
Over the past few years, Whitney has come to be recognized as one of the most influential abstract painters of the 21st century. Evidence of this growing institutional recognition includes the recent acquisition of the artist’s work by such prestigious institutions as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, as well as the critically acclaimed solo exhibition Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, Venice, which is currently on view as a collateral event to the the Venice Biennale.
