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Lot Essay
Painted in 2009, Bob’s Smile is a majestic work that testifies to the friendship between Stanley Whitney and Robert Rauschenberg. Alive with colour and rhythm, it represents a glowing tribute to the artist who not only became one of Whitney's most important influences, but who also helped to acquaint him with the New York art scene during his early career. Rendered in Whitney’s signature format, on one of his largest scales, its uneven rows of coloured blocks articulate a radiant chromatic spectrum. Painted with loose, textured brushstrokes, their hues range from deep, golden yellow and fiery orange to turquoise, azure, green, pale lemon and blush pink. Stacked in quivering alignment, they are divided by three horizontal strips, the uppermost of which features a prismatic, rainbow-like spread of colours. This distinctive device, showcased in a number of works at Whitney’s major exhibition during last year’s Venice Biennale, chimes poetically with the ‘smile’ conjured the work’s title. The composition seems to open up at this juncture, light filtering through it with beaming brilliance.
Today, Whitney’s work is celebrated worldwide, with his first museum retrospective scheduled for 2024 at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. For many years, however, he felt shunned by the establishment. Raised in a small African American community in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he moved to New York in 1968, completing his MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1972. At a time when Black artists were largely excluded from mainstream recognition, Rauschenberg introduced Whitney to the New York milieu, sharing his knowledge and advice generously. The two met through Al Taylor, whose future wife Debbie was Rauschenberg’s studio assistant; Whitney’s own girlfriend would later work for the artist’s non-profit organisation Change. It was a period of rich artistic exchange, with Brice Marden and others regularly dropping by, and drawings from Joseph Beuys arriving almost every week to Rauschenberg's studio in the post. Whitney, moreover, deeply admired Rauschenberg’s own works, and recalls the thrill of attending the artist’s retrospective with him in Washington D.C. ‘I learned how to be an artist’, he has said of the period, ‘—not simply how to make art’ (S. Whitney, quoted in A. Campbell, ‘Island Life’, Frieze, 20 March 2017).
It was not until the 1990s, however, that Whitney began to adopt the gridded format for which he is now best known. Inspired by travels in Egypt and Italy during this period, and the ancient architectural structures he encountered, he abandoned the dots and dabs that had defined his earlier oeuvre, and began to work with interlocking planes of colour. Yet while Whitney’s stacked rows have been likened to facade of the Colosseum, or the shelves of antiquities he observed at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, they ultimately reflect a broader synesthetic outlook. His works draw upon the rhythmic sensibilities of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi and Jackson Pollock, using colour, form and pattern to channel his fascination with jazz. The present work’s rainbow strip, meanwhile, witnesses his interests in African American quilts, recalling in particular the patterns used by women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This extraordinary sensitivity to diverse media and sources was ultimately what would set Whitney’s abstract language apart. It was an approach infused with the spirit of Rauschenberg himself: an artist whose own restless combination of different visual languages showed a young painter how to make sense of his world.
Today, Whitney’s work is celebrated worldwide, with his first museum retrospective scheduled for 2024 at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. For many years, however, he felt shunned by the establishment. Raised in a small African American community in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, he moved to New York in 1968, completing his MFA at the Yale School of Art in 1972. At a time when Black artists were largely excluded from mainstream recognition, Rauschenberg introduced Whitney to the New York milieu, sharing his knowledge and advice generously. The two met through Al Taylor, whose future wife Debbie was Rauschenberg’s studio assistant; Whitney’s own girlfriend would later work for the artist’s non-profit organisation Change. It was a period of rich artistic exchange, with Brice Marden and others regularly dropping by, and drawings from Joseph Beuys arriving almost every week to Rauschenberg's studio in the post. Whitney, moreover, deeply admired Rauschenberg’s own works, and recalls the thrill of attending the artist’s retrospective with him in Washington D.C. ‘I learned how to be an artist’, he has said of the period, ‘—not simply how to make art’ (S. Whitney, quoted in A. Campbell, ‘Island Life’, Frieze, 20 March 2017).
It was not until the 1990s, however, that Whitney began to adopt the gridded format for which he is now best known. Inspired by travels in Egypt and Italy during this period, and the ancient architectural structures he encountered, he abandoned the dots and dabs that had defined his earlier oeuvre, and began to work with interlocking planes of colour. Yet while Whitney’s stacked rows have been likened to facade of the Colosseum, or the shelves of antiquities he observed at the Museo Nazionale Etrusco, they ultimately reflect a broader synesthetic outlook. His works draw upon the rhythmic sensibilities of artists such as Piet Mondrian, Giorgio Morandi and Jackson Pollock, using colour, form and pattern to channel his fascination with jazz. The present work’s rainbow strip, meanwhile, witnesses his interests in African American quilts, recalling in particular the patterns used by women in Gee’s Bend, Alabama. This extraordinary sensitivity to diverse media and sources was ultimately what would set Whitney’s abstract language apart. It was an approach infused with the spirit of Rauschenberg himself: an artist whose own restless combination of different visual languages showed a young painter how to make sense of his world.