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Lot Essay
Spanning over 1.5 metres in height and width, New York Sound (2013) is an exuberant large-scale painting that glows with Stanley Whitney’s unique sense of colour, touch and light. For almost three decades, Whitney has worked in the same format: a square surface divided into four unequal, horizontal bands, which are each themselves filled with bright banners of colour, and divided by smaller strips the width of the artist’s brush. Within these outwardly limited tactics, he achieves an extraordinary freedom, playing lyrically among endless notes of colour, translucency and texture. New York Sound’s chromatic blocks range from a broad-brushed neon yellow—which fluoresces at the upper left like a beacon—to leafy greens, rich oranges, dripping scarlet, opaque flags of brown and a descending trio of turquoise to cobalt blue. Whitney paints freehand from top to bottom, responding to each colour in turn in an improvisatory ‘call and response’ approach. Indeed, as New York Sound’s title implies, music is a key organisational component to Whitney’s work, which can be understood in terms of rhythm, counterpoint, syncopation and harmony, with each painting an individual variation on a never-ending theme.
New York played an important role in the development of Whitney’s practice. Arriving there in 1968, he became a favourite student of Philip Guston’s on a summer program at Skidmore College. Immersed in the city’s art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism and Pop were giving way to Minimalism, he befriended Robert Rauschenberg, and became interested in the Colour Field painting advocated by Clement Greenberg, as well as the use of colour and structure in the work of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Whitney, however, never felt at home among any particular New York ‘school’—not least because, as an African American artist, he was something of an outsider. Unlike his Colour Field contemporaries, he valued a sense of touch and the artist’s hand, and sought to draw upon the wider world in his painting, rather than to depart from it.
In the early 1990s, Whitney and his wife left the United States to live in Italy for several years, and it was here—catalysed by inspirations as diverse as Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical still lifes, the matt, saturated palettes of Renaissance masterpieces by Botticelli, and, especially, the presence of ancient architecture—that his art truly came together. These stimuli led to the colour-stacking system that defines his paintings to this day. ‘When you walk into the Roman Colosseum, you really feel, from the first brick to the last brick, how human they are’, he says. ‘And then walking around, you see ancient and modern Rome side by side and how they relate … The colour of the architecture, and the different light qualities in sun and shade’ (S. Whitney, quoted in L. Neri, ‘The Space is in the Colour’, Gagosian Quarterly, 10 April 2020). This relational, architectonic understanding can be seen to imbue New York Sound, which is alive not only with colour and light, but also with a symphonic feel for shape, mass and space. The influence of Italy is the focus of the acclaimed current exhibition Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, on view until November 2022 in Venice’s Palazzo Tiepolo Passi; in 2024, Whitney will have his first museum retrospective, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York. It will be an apt homecoming for an artist whose New York Sound has always moved to its own unerring beat.
New York played an important role in the development of Whitney’s practice. Arriving there in 1968, he became a favourite student of Philip Guston’s on a summer program at Skidmore College. Immersed in the city’s art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism and Pop were giving way to Minimalism, he befriended Robert Rauschenberg, and became interested in the Colour Field painting advocated by Clement Greenberg, as well as the use of colour and structure in the work of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Whitney, however, never felt at home among any particular New York ‘school’—not least because, as an African American artist, he was something of an outsider. Unlike his Colour Field contemporaries, he valued a sense of touch and the artist’s hand, and sought to draw upon the wider world in his painting, rather than to depart from it.
In the early 1990s, Whitney and his wife left the United States to live in Italy for several years, and it was here—catalysed by inspirations as diverse as Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical still lifes, the matt, saturated palettes of Renaissance masterpieces by Botticelli, and, especially, the presence of ancient architecture—that his art truly came together. These stimuli led to the colour-stacking system that defines his paintings to this day. ‘When you walk into the Roman Colosseum, you really feel, from the first brick to the last brick, how human they are’, he says. ‘And then walking around, you see ancient and modern Rome side by side and how they relate … The colour of the architecture, and the different light qualities in sun and shade’ (S. Whitney, quoted in L. Neri, ‘The Space is in the Colour’, Gagosian Quarterly, 10 April 2020). This relational, architectonic understanding can be seen to imbue New York Sound, which is alive not only with colour and light, but also with a symphonic feel for shape, mass and space. The influence of Italy is the focus of the acclaimed current exhibition Stanley Whitney: The Italian Paintings, on view until November 2022 in Venice’s Palazzo Tiepolo Passi; in 2024, Whitney will have his first museum retrospective, at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, formerly known as the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, in Buffalo, New York. It will be an apt homecoming for an artist whose New York Sound has always moved to its own unerring beat.