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Art Market

Stanley Whitney’s Vibrant Abstract Works Are Appealing to Collectors of All Kinds

Daria Simone Harper
Nov 4, 2021 7:34PM
Stanley Whitney
Untitled, 2021
Two Palms

For Stanley Whitney, studying color is about far more than structuring or comparing hues in relation to one another. In his chromatic and purposeful works, color serves as a way to understand space, rhythm, and the world around us. The 75-year-old abstract painter has spent decades mastering his signature stacks of small color fields, which form into prominent gridlike patterns within the frame of his canvas. Over the past several years, institutional interest in his work has increased substantially, helping to propel his career, as well as his market trajectory. In 2015, the Studio Museum in Harlem presented “Stanley Whitney: Dance the Orange,” a critically acclaimed show that preceded a flurry of important exhibitions for Whitney. The same year, Lisson Gallery welcomed Whitney onto its roster and mounted its first presentation of his work in Milan.

Lisson Gallery’s New York space currently has on view “Stanley Whitney: TwentyTwenty,” an exhibition of new paintings created by the artist over the course of the past year. The show marks Whitney’s ninth solo presentation with the gallery and includes a new series, “Monk & Munch,” which references renowned jazz pianist Thelonious Monkand Norwegian painter Edvard Munch. In a recent interview with Artsy, Whitney shared that his pairing of these seemingly disparate artists stems from an exploration of the radical elements of both of their work.

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Whitney’s new series also sees the artist return to transferring his washes of vibrant paint onto a smaller rectangular format, which he worked with earlier in his career. “I wanted something that was really challenging in terms of how I could get a good rhythm, and that’s in the square,” said Whitney, explaining how he arrived at the square shapes that populate his canvases. “It’s such a basic, old symbol…it goes back to ancient times.” By setting fixed parameters on his artistic practice, Whitney creates a seemingly infinite number of compositions examining the relation between color and space.

Born in Philadelphia in 1946, Whitney earned his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, and eventually graduated with an MFA from Yale University. A lifelong music lover, Whitney’s intuitive painterly process draws parallels to the free-flowing and improvisational style of his favorite jazz musicians. From Miles Davis to Nina Simone, Whitney cites the nature of jazz music as a major source of inspiration when he was young, and throughout his life. After first arriving in New York in 1968, Whitney would socialize with other notable Black artists such as Jack Whitten and Al Taylor.

Stanley Whitney
Untitled, 2021
Two Palms

Stanley Whitney, Slow Walk #2, 2016. Courtesy of Phillips.

According to Rebekah Bowling, co-head of day sales at Phillips, the 2018 sale of Whitney’s work Slow Walk No. #2 (2016) marked an important shift in the course of his secondary market. The vivid oil on linen artwork was featured in a 20th-century and contemporary art day sale at Phillips in London, and sold for £87,500 ($121,196). Bowling noted that prior to this sale, Whitney’s works were typically priced at around $40,000 to $60,000, and showed up at some smaller regional auction houses—2018 was the first time the artist’s work had appeared at the auction house.

Since then, the demand for Whitney’s work on the secondary market has skyrocketed. Earlier this year, Whitney’s 2016 work Light a New Wilderness sold for a whopping £525,000 ($726,618) at a Christie’s 20th- and 21st-century evening sale in London, notching a new record for the artist and selling for nearly three times its high estimate of £180,000 ($248,515).

Whitney’s work is typically sought after by American and European collectors, though his base has expanded over the years. “There was a large European contingent from the start,” Bowling said. According to her, there has also been more recent interest from collectors in Asian countries. She has also noticed an uptick in attention from less established collectors. Though newer collectors may be priced out of some of Whitney’s larger and more expensive works, Bowling said she’s noticed young collectors buying his works on paper.

Whitney’s primary market is also on a steady climb, with Lisson Gallery selling many of his large paintings at high price points in the past several years. At Art Basel in Miami Beach in 2019, Lisson sold the large paintingBlue in the Middle (2019) for $250,000. The following year, during Art Basel in Miami Beach’s 2020 edition, the gallery sold a work titled Night Cafe Deux (2020) for $500,000 to an institution in Asia. Despite the fair pivoting to online-only presentations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Whitney’s work sold for double the amount that his painting from the previous year had. Meanwhile, in April 2020, Gagosian sold Whitney’s painting Kind of Blue (2020), priced at $350,000, as part of its online-only “Artist Spotlight” series.

Whitney’s market is likely to continue to climb, with several major presentations on the near horizon. In December 2021, Whitney will debut a set of three stained-glass windows in the Baltimore Museum of Art’s brand-new Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies. Marking his first-ever commission for a museum, the work, titled Dance With Me Henri (2021), places Whitney in conversation with renowned French artist Henri Matisse.

Next year during the 59th Venice Biennale, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum will present “The Italian Paintings” at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi. The presentation will feature paintings from Whitney’s time in Italy, where the artist has been visiting frequently since 1992. Further down the line, in 2023, the Buffalo AKG Art Museum is set to mount Whitney’s first-ever institutional retrospective, under the direction of the museum’s chief curator, Cathleen Chaffee.

As he looks ahead to the future, Whitney is grateful for the opportunity to begin reflecting on the past several decades of his life and career. “It’s an important moment because I’d never really looked back before, I’ve always looked forward,” he explained. “So it’s really strange, because now I can go both ways and think about all of the things happening politically, socially, and economically at the time that led to making those decisions.”

Daria Simone Harper