Stanley Whitney’s Long-Overdue Retrospective Explores His Path to Abstraction

“It took a long time for me to figure things out,” Stanley Whitney said to a packed audience at the opening of his first museum retrospective, “How High the Moon,” at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. It was a candid conversation between Whitney and the exhibition’s curator, Cathleen Chaffee, that explored the evolution of his five-decade career.

“How High the Moon,” which opened February 9th, features dozens of oil paintings in a style the artist is now known for: saturated rectangles of colors arranged into four distinct rows, each separated by a thick line. Whitney has been devoted to this format since 2002, painting these richly colored, loose grids repeatedly on small and large scales, with his well-known square format ranging from 12 square inches to 96 square inches.

Born in 1946 in Philadelphia, Whitney grew up surrounded by music, particularly jazz. “I didn’t grow up in a family that looked at art or knew what art was,” he said. Still, he took his first art class around the age of 12 and continued drawing and painting sporadically throughout high school. In his late teenage years, he began painting more seriously, creating grave-looking portraits of people from his daily life. Whitney entered art school to avoid the draft, first the Columbus College of Art and Design and then the Kansas City Art Institute. “I fell in love with the work of Paul Cézanne. I went to school to be an illustrator, not a painter, but Cézanne always stuck with me,” Whitney said. “I was always looking at other artists like [Diego] Velázquez and [Francisco] de Goya and trying to figure out what painting was. I never knew what I was doing, but I knew I wanted to paint.”

In 1968, he enrolled in Skidmore College’s Summer Six artist residency, where he was mentored by Robert Reed and Philip Guston. “From 1968 to 1970, I really had no idea what I was doing,” Whitney said. “I was working outside, making landscapes, which I normally didn’t do. I’d see shows and artists in New York all the time and come back to my studio and try this and try that, but I didn’t know what my subject matter would be.” He did, however, know he wasn’t interested in taking a political stance with his work. Though the Black Panther movement was rising and Whitney himself was visited by members in Kansas City in 1968, he didn’t feel it was his calling to join. At the same time, he started to explore abstraction. With Guston’s help, Whitney achieved a long-term goal of moving to New York through a scholarship to the Studio School, though he dropped out after just a few weeks.

Whitney spent the next few years immersing himself in the art scene while working odd jobs and painting in his free time. In 1970, he began an MFA at Yale and started using acrylic. “I saw other artists like Larry Poons and Morris Louis and my teacher, Al Held, doing it, so I gave it a go,” he said. The exhibition includes a large-scale painting from this time, Untitled (1972), which he made with a mop, a tool he used at the suggestion of Held. “I thought he was crazy—a mop!” said Whitney. The work has layers of paint built up from the background and thick, gestural lines that swirl across the surface. This exploration of gesture and the spatial orientation of background and foreground remained characteristic of Whitney’s work for decades.

The exhibition begins with this 1972 painting, but his work over the next several years is represented by his prints and works on paper, as Whitney got rid of paintings constantly while he found his voice. “I would do a painting and throw it over the wall,” he said. “I was thinking about space and color. I didn’t like the idea of a background, but I was always interested in creating space within my work. I was thinking about music and people like [Jackson] Pollock, [Mark] Rothko, and [Piet] Mondrian. I didn’t know what all of this meant, I just wanted to make a good painting.” This part of the presentation demonstrates Whitney’s early interest in color, space, and abstraction.

Along with a selection of sketchbooks, these early pieces illustrate how drawing became a way for Whitney to work out his ideas, a lesson he imparted in his students during his decades of teaching. “I was so in debt to [lower Manhattan art supply store] Pearl Paint that I realized I should try figuring things out in drawing,” he said. Later in his career, drawing also became a way to fulfill his need to create gestures as his painting moved away from gestural composition in the early 2000s.

In the 1980s, Whitney stopped using acrylic, instead taking up oil paint to create circles of color and gestural, almost calligraphic lines, still retaining a sense of space in the layers and building from the background. Experiencing little commercial success (and only receiving his first solo gallery show in 1987), Whitney accepted teaching positions at Berkeley and Stanford in 1986.

He traveled throughout the American West, as well as to Italy and Egypt, and began drawing inspiration from the world around him. When he was in Italy, horizontal bands reminiscent of Classical architecture began to appear in the artist’s work. Visiting Egypt in 1993, Whitney finally understood how to create space with his colors instead of building compositions from the background after seeing the stacked bricks of monuments, a realization he called the “last piece of the puzzle.”

In 2002, Whitney began what would become his best-known body of work, one that he continues to create to this day. Rectangles of color replaced the circles and gestures disappeared. “I was sick of seeing graffiti all over Europe and I started looking at the work of Giorgio Morandi. It was so simple and quiet. I wanted to reinvent a gesture with quietness and where color dominates the hand,” he said.