How Stanley Whitney Became an Icon of Contemporary Abstraction in His Seventies

If it’s a truism that paintings are windows into different worlds, Stanley Whitney’s abstract canvases are some of contemporary art’s best portals into color. His trademark compositions comprise off-kilter grids, with horizontal lines separating rows of brightly hued squares. Edges are soft and flowing, creating a sense of rhythm throughout the works. Whitney’s work is easy to look at, but more difficult to figure out: How are these colors coalescing, and to what effect?

Whitney’s practice finds infinite permutations within a simple formal conceit—rows of squares, separated by thin lines. In this way, his canvases respond to the idea of the grid, which has served as an organizing structure for painters across centuries. Like Peter Halley, Donald Judd, and countless others, Whitney offers a fresh twist on the motif. It’s easy, upon a cursory glance, to dismiss such work as repetitive. Instead, Whitney’s paintings reward long, repeated lookings, giving viewers the chance to notice subtle differences, brushstrokes, patterns, and color interactions. Paint drips, layers, and transitional borders become monumental.

“The paintings are about opening space,” Whitney told me recently during a visit to his studio in Ridgewood, Queens. “Then people can think and wander.” His appreciation of deep, slow art appreciation also extends to his literary interests: Recently, he’s been spending each day reading four to five pages of Proust—that master of elevating accumulated minutiae into masterpieces.

Whitney’s omnivorous aesthetic tastes extend from 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez (“I love the way he touched the canvas”) to ancient Native American ceramicists. Whitney described the impact a Navajo bowl had on him: “There’s one brushmark that goes around, that goes from dark to light. You feel that hand. You think: ‘That’s just like me. That’s anyone’s hand. That’s what it is to be human.’” If artmaking requires significant solitude, its production also offers Whitney a means of connection. It’s no surprise that his paintings often display swaths of thin, back-and-forth brushstrokes—they highlight his process and the movement of his own, individual hand.

While these paintings offer new perspectives for viewers, they’ve also liberated the artist himself. Whitney came of age during the Vietnam War (narrowly avoiding the draft due to his asthma) and a time of great American upheaval. The Philadelphia-born artist recalls how, when he was a student at the Kansas City Art Institute, the Black Panthers knocked on his studio door, trying to recruit him for their cause. He didn’t want to get involved—instead, he stayed in his studio. He just wanted to paint. At the same time, he avoided the demands of his day for African-American artists to make politically engaged, figurative work that was explicitly about the black experience.

For years, Whitney worked in relative isolation. He moved to New York in the 1960s, with a brief interlude at Yale University’s MFA program, from which he graduated in 1972. Though he befriended artists such as Al Taylor (and through him, Robert Rauschenberg), mainstream attention eluded him. For over 20 years, Whitney supported himself by teaching at Philadelphia’s Tyler School of Art at Temple University. “I was up and down the highway,” he said, recalling his drives to and from New York. His summers were free, and instead of going to popular residencies such as Skowhegan or Yaddo, he stayed home. “I didn’t want to be bothered with people,” he said. “I just wanted to paint.” In the 1990s, he decamped to Rome with his wife, fellow painter Marina Adams. Going to Europe, he told me, was one of his smartest moves. Vienna’s Christine König Galerie began showing him and took his work to Art Basel. In the United States, gallerist José Freire (who ran Fiction/Nonfiction, then Team Gallery) also exhibited Whitney’s work.

Eventually, a larger audience caught on. In 2015, the Studio Museum in Harlem mounted a major solo exhibition of Whitney’s work—his most prominent institutional show to date. Lisson Gallery brought him onto its roster and have since given him four solo gallery shows (in New York, London, and Milan). Through December 21st, the gallery’s stateside space is showing his work from the 1990s onward. Drawings and canvases of varying scales line the walls. The longer the viewer looks, the less any two works share in common. Each configuration adopts a mood of its own. In the Color (2018), for example, with its central swath of teal and four sections of yellow, offers a significant contrast to Untitled (1997). In the latter work, squares mingle with much thinner rectangles, and busier brushstrokes create murkier divisions between each patch of color. These elements, combined with a palette full of reds, greens, and blacks, make for a more intense, noisier canvas.