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Lot Essay
For the past three decades, Stanley Whitney has begun each painting in the same manner, and while listening to the same music—Miles Davis’s ‘Bitches Brew’: he first paints a horizontal strip along the top edge of the canvas before laying down bright, colourful blocks from left to right. The resulting compositions are sensitive, strong, vivacious, and playful, refracting ideas around music, poetry, and art history through brilliant grids of colour. Painted in 2007, Summers Night evokes dusk in the city: the glow of streetlamps, the day’s red-hot heat cooling to a tolerable temperature, the way that concrete streets come alive during those warm summer’s nights. Although abstract, Whitney’s painting tells a lyrical story; it captures an entire mood, at once architectural, musical, and embodied. For the artist, 2022 marks an exciting moment in his long career. His solo presentation, Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, is currently on view at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi as part of the Venice Biennale. In December 2021, the Baltimore Museum of Art unveiled the artist’s Dance with me Henri, a commission of three stained glass windows for the museum’s new Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, and next year will bring Whitney’s retrospective at Buffalo AKG Art Museum.
Along with Matisse, Whitney cites Paul Cézanne, and the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as early influences. Remembering gallery visits he made as a young artist, Whitney said, ‘I was always a colourist. I’d go to all the galleries, get to my studio and say, “Well Stanley, you see what they like, do you want to keep doing this?” And I would say, ‘Yeah, I want to keep doing this”’ (S. Whitney, quoted in H. Sheets, ‘Stanley Whitney Dances With Matisse’, New York Times, 29 October 2021). Early on, Whitney dabbled in portraiture and landscape paintings but never felt fully at home as a figurative artist. He credits Philip Guston, who he met during a summer program at Skidmore College in 1968, with helping his young self navigate the shift towards abstraction. ‘I met him when he was lost and I was lost, although I was going from figuration to abstraction and he was going the other way,’ said Whitney (S. Whitney, quoted ibid.).
It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Whitney felt he finally understood his own aims. Through encounters with ancient architecture while on a trip in Italy and Egypt, the conceit of painting space through colour came to feel almost inevitable. ‘I kept thinking that if I put the colours side by side, I would lose all the air. I didn’t realise the space was in the colour,’ he recalled. ‘Once I figured that out, I could make paintings that were much looser. There was space to get around’ (S. Whitney, quoted in J. Bahn, ‘Space within the colour’, Cereal, March 2019, p. 151). Certainly, this architectural vision is palpable in Summers Night which, without even the hint of representational imagery, summons an entire urban ecosystem. The painting radiates its own heat, and the colours resides the sultry, soft breeze of a sweltering, joyous city.
Along with Matisse, Whitney cites Paul Cézanne, and the Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko as early influences. Remembering gallery visits he made as a young artist, Whitney said, ‘I was always a colourist. I’d go to all the galleries, get to my studio and say, “Well Stanley, you see what they like, do you want to keep doing this?” And I would say, ‘Yeah, I want to keep doing this”’ (S. Whitney, quoted in H. Sheets, ‘Stanley Whitney Dances With Matisse’, New York Times, 29 October 2021). Early on, Whitney dabbled in portraiture and landscape paintings but never felt fully at home as a figurative artist. He credits Philip Guston, who he met during a summer program at Skidmore College in 1968, with helping his young self navigate the shift towards abstraction. ‘I met him when he was lost and I was lost, although I was going from figuration to abstraction and he was going the other way,’ said Whitney (S. Whitney, quoted ibid.).
It wasn’t until the early 1990s that Whitney felt he finally understood his own aims. Through encounters with ancient architecture while on a trip in Italy and Egypt, the conceit of painting space through colour came to feel almost inevitable. ‘I kept thinking that if I put the colours side by side, I would lose all the air. I didn’t realise the space was in the colour,’ he recalled. ‘Once I figured that out, I could make paintings that were much looser. There was space to get around’ (S. Whitney, quoted in J. Bahn, ‘Space within the colour’, Cereal, March 2019, p. 151). Certainly, this architectural vision is palpable in Summers Night which, without even the hint of representational imagery, summons an entire urban ecosystem. The painting radiates its own heat, and the colours resides the sultry, soft breeze of a sweltering, joyous city.