Jack Whitten, 1939-2018

By Zachary Vincent

Eta Group IV, from the Greek Alphabet Series, 1976, acrylic on canvas

How to write a biography for a man who once said of his life and artistic practice, “I do not depend on a narrative”? Perhaps the answer is in the question. The only ‘narrative’ which seems applicable to his life is that of freedom. Freedom from narrative. Freedom from violence. Freedom from the constraints of academic modernism. Freedom to create and express. Freedom is an invitation for contemplation on this 5th December, 84 years after the birth of a fascinating and influential artist. While Whitten depended on no one narrative, he shaped many.

Jack Whitten’s first search for freedom began when he met the Revd. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama. Inspired by King’s commitment to nonviolent protest, a teenaged Whitten chose to leave the state of his birth and travel from Alabama to New York City. Whitten later said of being a young Black man in the Southern United States, “I knew that if I stayed then I would eventually kill someone, or somebody would kill me.” This freedom from violence brought Whitten into contact with some of the most important gestural artists of the day, most prominently Willem de Kooning. While de Kooning was a positive mentor for Whitten, the young artist also knew he would need to develop a style distinctly his own.

With Whitten’s search for freedom from the established boundaries of modernism came a turn away from the bright colours and gestural brushstrokes which characterised his 1960s practice at Manhattan’s Cooper Union school. Replacing it was something distinctly Whitten: challenging, bold, and thoughtful. The ‘anachromic’ period of Whitten’s art in the 1970s did the opposite of what many expressionists had been doing. It sought to minimize the presence of the artist in the final product, to mechanise parts of the artistic process and create something not expressive but constructed.

The Greek Letter series from 1975-78 is demonstrative of this era of Whitten’s art. Works like Eta Group IV (1976) are made by pulling tools (what Whitten called ‘developers’) through planes of black and white acrylic paint in methodical ways. Geometry takes over. There are lines, squares, circles. There are gradients and subtleties, but they aren’t obviously imbibed with any transcendental meaning. The piece is compelling, entrancing even, but distant. The Greek Letter series can be challenging to look at, as there is a lack of emotion; even the names give little away, just one letter in an alphabet. For any who knew Whitten, it could be surprising to see an artist who lived with such passion and liveliness paint and create in such a cold, controlled way. And yet, it is in light of Whitten’s search for freedom which they must be viewed. Ever the pioneer, Whitten was doing something different from the artists who came before and proving that he wasn’t reliant on conventional modernist rules of the day.

Self Portrait, 1996, multimedia mosaic

Whitten freed himself from his Southern upbringing with his move to New York, and he freed himself from the United States as he began to travel the world. Spending time in Mexico, Italy, and Crete, Whitten came to be fascinated by the possibilities of mosaics and their connections to mathematics, specifically fractal geometry. This helped to launch a new era of artmaking for Whitten, one of large multimedia murals and an expansion of figural representation. With series like DNA (1979) and proceeding works, Whitten explored how small pieces come together to create grand images – pieces of glass in a mural and individuals in a community. Themes of collective memory, the value of human bonds, and Blackness in America were addressed with more brightness and expression than the Greek Letter series, but Whitten’s need to free himself from established art was the same. Only now, he was finding freedom from himself and the art he had already created.

Looking back on Whitten’s career, it wasn’t always successfully linear. He was plagued with self-doubt, had troubles with money, and always had to deal with the complication of being a Black artist in a field which was, at times, openly hostile to his success. But Jack Whitten was always committed to the principle of freedom, and he always used his art as a means of achieving it. As the artist himself put it, “Only art is open to change. It is the artists who must ‘test’ everything in society. This testing is what gives us freedom.” It is fair to say that Whitten’s art is now free from time itself and it will be appreciated through the ages to come.

Bibliography

“An Interview with Artist Jack Whitten”. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. Accessed December 1, 2023. https://crystalbridges.org/blog/an-interview-with-artist-jack-whitten/.

Bourland, Ian. “Jack Whitten (1939-2018)”. Frieze, January 24, 2018.

Budick, Ariella. “Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings”. Financial Times, March 1, 2023.

Elujoba, Yinka. “Revealing Jack Whitten’s Secret Self”. New York Times, January 21, 2021.

Little, Colony. “’I am Black, Angry, Tired of Teaching, Tired of Being Poor’: Jack Whitten’s Newly Published Journals Reveal a Long, Painful Road to Recognition”. Artnet, August 6, 2018. Accessed December 1, 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world/jack-whittens-newly-published-journals-1327919.