#abstract expression

The Porch Door (1962)

ONE ENCHANTED SURFACE

I had understood that a drawing lived on the surface while a painting conjured greater depths. The Jack Whitten retrospective The Messenger at MoMA calls this into question. The canvases here are elaborate, elegant, exquisitely-crafted surfaces that hold all meanings within the depth of the paint. This substance is scraped, clotted, spotted, sprayed, smeared, disrupted, healed. And the paintings refuse pictorialism; they don't refer to anything outside of themselves. The paint is all there is.

The museum carefully positions Whitten as an Afro-American artist. Wall texts note his southern heritage, involvement in the Civil Rights Movement, love of jazz, and use of an "Afro-comb" to make marks. It also asserts his place within Abstract Expressionism, predictably under-recognized. His paintings from the 1960's, large canvases in which he laid strata of acrylic paint across the canvas with a rake-like instrument called a "developer," have a haunted barely-there quality that prefigures Gerhard Richter's Abstracts from the 1990's. But while Gerhard's paintings feel conceptual, like the residue of a process, Whitten's feel originary, making a new geography.

They remind me of Robert Ryman's canvases, which take the application of paint on canvas as their subject, only executed at a monumental scale. What figures that emerge are forms of paint. The developer's tines squeeze acrylic into narrow streams. Ridges form, millimeters high, around staples, threads, coat hangers, and other objects fastened on and below the canvas. Criss-crossing motions leave a fine grid. Spills, smears, or marks across them complicate rhythms.

There are, in the large galleries on MoMA's sixth floor, some of Whitten's sculptures also. Inspired by summers in Crete, they combine rustic materials and found objects in stately, almost classical, compositions. But the paintings command the space. Each makes an enchanted, engrossing surface. Tissue-like, they tremble with life.

The Dream Within The Dream

“Far Off Places”

15x11in.

Mixed media on paper.