Stanley Whitney (1946- )

Born in Philadelphia in 1946, Stanley Whitney is a significant American abstract artist who only received the critical acclaim he deserved following a recent solo exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem. Growing up in a small African American community outside of Philadelphia, Whitney had a long interest in jazz music; he would travel to New York during weekends to listen to Jazz in the city. After completing his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute, Whitney was already slowly shifting toward abstraction. In 1992, Whitney’s artistic career had its most substantial shift when he settled in Rome. He was moved by the architecture and Renaissance paintings and finally reached his reconciliation with the displacement of color and space. From this point forward, Whitney painted in his most notable mature style; he uses color as a spatial indication rather than separating the two as independent subjects within one work.

In 1973, Whitney was a Professor of Painting and Drawing at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, commuting from New York to Philadelphia. Whitney, who felt equally inspired by the formal qualities of Abstract Expressionism and the vivid tonality inherent to the Color Field movement, began to experiment with abstraction. Though his signature style remains concretely abstract, Black history and jazz figured as principal influences for Whitney, whose works are full of thematic resilience and rhythm. Adam Pendleton, who owns a number of paintings and drawings by Whitney, admires his older colleague’s “dogged dedication to a toolbox that appears fixed but is infinite in all the ways he unfixes it,” he said. Whitney’s longstanding engagement with the grid is about “how to break down visual order and imbue it with music, with life, with a kind of poetic.” His iconic, loose matrices of vibrant color distinguish his work as a unique blend of minimalist and color field exploration. In 2010, Whitney was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, followed by the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting in 2011. Whitney’s work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven. He splits his time between Manhattan and Parma Italy, continuing to produce his iconic, stylized compositions.

This monotype features a vibrant, cobalt blue band across the top of the composition, which is accented exquisitely by a canary yellow burst from the adjacent top left square. Stacked tightly below, ruddy rectangles congeal against one another, filling the grids with minimal white space allowed. From the tactility invoked by the strokes of chroma to the mutability of the color block’s form, Stay Songs' details mark each work as a singularly exuberant aesthetic experience. Stay Songs is a series of monotypes on paper that constitute vivid portals into colorful abstraction (pictured above). Each work is an example of the artist’s aptitude for color theory, shape, and composition, with Whitney’s trademark style of rhythmic repetition, accented with wobbly, whimsical color grids. By making use of the negative space on the paper to differentiate the shapes of each colorful form, Whitney effortlessly incorporates a sense of verticality and horizontality in his compositions.

Provenance

Team Gallery, Inc., New York, NY

Private Collection

Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Exhibition History

Decades of Acquisitions: Works on Paper from the Collection 24 February – 30 April 2022

Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Printed Paper, 18 May – 8 July 2023, Bill Hodges Gallery, New York, NY

Stay Songs, 2002

Monotype on Paper (Unique)

Image: 8 ⅞ x 8 ⅞ in. (22.5 x 22.5 cm)

Sheet: 22 1/4 x 21 1/4 in. (56.5 x 53.9 cm)

Signed and Dated on Reverse: 02-2002 SW