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Lot Essay
Spanning almost two metres in height and width, Fellow Traveler is a luminous large-scale painting by Stanley Whitney. Painted in 2014, the year before his breakthrough exhibition at the Studio Museum in Harlem, it captures the distinctive chromatic language for which he has since received widespread critical acclaim. Rendered in his signature format, and on one of his largest scales, the work comprises four rows of quivering coloured blocks, each intercepted by vertical bands. Tones of red, teal, sky blue and gold jostle and sing, each alive with the trace of the painter’s touch. Whitney draws inspiration from art history and jazz, as well as travels in Italy and Egypt: an influence conjured, perhaps, by the present work’s title. With a major solo exhibition at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi during last year’s Venice Biennale—which included a number of works from this period—and a forthcoming retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Museum in 2024, he has taken his place as one of America’s greatest living abstract artists.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Whitney arrived in New York as an art student in the late 1960s. He admired the work of Paul Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi and Piet Mondrian, as well as Philip Guston, Morris Louis and other contemporary figures associated with Abstract Expressionism. During this period Whitney studied at the Yale University School of Art, where Josef Albers had famously launched his extraordinary sequence of Homages to the Square. Like Albers, Whitney was fascinated by the relationships between different tonalities. Yet where the former Bauhaus artist tested his observations with precise, near-scientific rigour, Whitney allowed himself to be guided by intuition, responding in real time to the frictions, harmonies, textures and discords that arose from his application of colour. The rhythms of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and others were deeply instructive in this regard, furnishing Whitney with a flair for improvisation. ‘I follow the paintings—the paintings run to the door, through the door, around the corner, and I run after them’, he explains (S. Whitney, quoted in A. D’Souza, ‘“The Colour Makes the Structure”: Stanley Whitney Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, 30 May 2017).
It was not until the early 1990s, however—inspired by a series of trips abroad—that Whitney hit upon the gridded format that would come to define his art. In Rome he marvelled at the Colosseum; in Naples he visited the National Archaeological Museum, where he admired the Boscoreale frescoes. These extraordinary wall paintings, with their keen sensitivity to the relationship between colour and space, prompted Whitney to begin thinking about his works in architectural terms. A visit to the pyramids in Egypt cemented this line of enquiry: ‘until I went to Egypt, I had this idea that if I put the colours right next to one another there wouldn’t be any air’, he explained. ‘I wanted colour like Rothko, but I wanted air like Pollock. I didn’t realise that the space was in the colour’ (S. Whitney, quoted ibid.). From this point onwards, Whitney began to arrange his compositions in tessellating bricks, later adding horizontal strips that divide the blocks like beams or lintels. The hues vibrate at their contact points like chords, creating a temple of light, space and colour.
Originally from Pennsylvania, Whitney arrived in New York as an art student in the late 1960s. He admired the work of Paul Cézanne, Giorgio Morandi and Piet Mondrian, as well as Philip Guston, Morris Louis and other contemporary figures associated with Abstract Expressionism. During this period Whitney studied at the Yale University School of Art, where Josef Albers had famously launched his extraordinary sequence of Homages to the Square. Like Albers, Whitney was fascinated by the relationships between different tonalities. Yet where the former Bauhaus artist tested his observations with precise, near-scientific rigour, Whitney allowed himself to be guided by intuition, responding in real time to the frictions, harmonies, textures and discords that arose from his application of colour. The rhythms of Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Charlie Parker and others were deeply instructive in this regard, furnishing Whitney with a flair for improvisation. ‘I follow the paintings—the paintings run to the door, through the door, around the corner, and I run after them’, he explains (S. Whitney, quoted in A. D’Souza, ‘“The Colour Makes the Structure”: Stanley Whitney Paints a Picture’, ARTnews, 30 May 2017).
It was not until the early 1990s, however—inspired by a series of trips abroad—that Whitney hit upon the gridded format that would come to define his art. In Rome he marvelled at the Colosseum; in Naples he visited the National Archaeological Museum, where he admired the Boscoreale frescoes. These extraordinary wall paintings, with their keen sensitivity to the relationship between colour and space, prompted Whitney to begin thinking about his works in architectural terms. A visit to the pyramids in Egypt cemented this line of enquiry: ‘until I went to Egypt, I had this idea that if I put the colours right next to one another there wouldn’t be any air’, he explained. ‘I wanted colour like Rothko, but I wanted air like Pollock. I didn’t realise that the space was in the colour’ (S. Whitney, quoted ibid.). From this point onwards, Whitney began to arrange his compositions in tessellating bricks, later adding horizontal strips that divide the blocks like beams or lintels. The hues vibrate at their contact points like chords, creating a temple of light, space and colour.