Courtney J. Martin, the director of the Yale Center for British Art, remembers seeing a striking painting by Jack Whitten at a family friend’s house as a child. It wasn’t until she began studying art history in her twenties that she realized that the painting, with its stark palette, striped surface and geometric composition floating in a strange optical space, was part of a series Whitten had created in the mid-1970s. .
And it wasn’t until she started thinking about exhibiting the work at Dia Art Foundation, where she served as Chief Curator and Deputy Director from 2017 to 2019, that she began to understand just how many of these works there actually were. , and the important role they played in the career of the modernist giant.
The suite, called the Greek Alphabet paintings because he used the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet as an ordering principle, about 60, and on which the painter focused alone from 1975 to 1978. They represent a crucial turning point in his approach to his medium – a hinge between his colorful atmospheric abstractions of the 1960s and early 1970s and his more sculptural tesserae paintings of the 1980s – but they have never been shown together in any significant number.
A new show at Dia:Beacon, “Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Series,” brings together 40 of these works. In a recent conversation, Donna De Salvo, one of the exhibition’s curators, said they represent something like a “lost chapter” in the story of Whitten’s development as an artist. De Salvo, along with Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, guided Martin’s idea for the exhibition after she left Dia for Yale in 2019.
Whitten’s work on the series began in March 1975, shortly after his first institutional solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974. As De Salvo explains, the artist was deeply involved in his move away from abstract expressionism and its emphasis on the abstract expressionism. characteristic brush stroke, but also of emotionally charged colours. “He makes the decision to kind of let go of color and do these achromatic paintings with incredible permutations in them,” she said.
“This is a body of work with a system,” said Guidelli-Guidi, a set of self-imposed rules that guided his studio experiments. That rule-based approach was embraced by other important conceptual artists of the period, including Sol LeWitt and Robert Ryman. It was also an aspect of the thinking of Robert Smithson, the creator of “Spiral Jetty” and an artist in whom Whitten took a particular interest. “He uses tons of dirt; I use paint,” he wrote in 1974.
Whitten’s rules went something like this: For each letter of the Greek alphabet, he worked on a specific canvas size and with a single compositional idea until he exhausted its possibilities, then moved on to the next letter, sticking to held another series. of conditions. (For example, for the four paintings that make up the “Eta” group, he focused on circles and diagonals placed on a striped surface, while the three “Lambda” paintings are composed of two horizontal rectangles floating one above the other.)
He worked on the floor, pouring or spraying layers of black and white paint onto canvas, then manipulating them using tools he called “developers” that he found or made—squeegees, rakes, and combs, some up to 12-feet wide – to produce striped patterns or scraped textures. Various objects placed under the linen—threads, flat geometric shapes, pebbles collected from the beaches of Crete, or other “disturbers”—resulted in blips, flowers, and flares as Whitten drew pigment over them. He mixed acrylic with graphite powder, silica or hot water so that the light would refract differently; sometimes he used a power drill or an ice pick to make small holes in his paintings which he then refilled, creating small points of light or stuttering lines.
Many of these techniques have been developed to release the brush, and thus the evidence of the artist’s hand. But Whitten kept a fine line: “Yes, non-gesture, but not machine,” he wrote.
All this experimentation with materials and processes was in the service of creating surfaces that seem to vibrate to the eye. “At some point he started using some sort of serrated knife,” Guidelli-Guidi says. “It really cut into the acrylic so the layers showed.” The exposed black-and-white paint layers create a shimmering moiré effect in some works, a greyish glowing aura in others, she explained.
Whitten compared his process to that of John Coltrane’s sheets of sound—densely packed notes played so quickly that they almost seemed to be stacked on top of each other. He also regarded his paintings as ‘sheets of light’. They also suggest images of deep space, early computer screens, quantum mechanics, fractal geometry and topographical maps – reflecting the artist’s deep interest in technology and science.
Whitten and his wife, Mary Whitten (nee Staikos), who was of Greek descent, began spending summers in Crete in 1969, and he dove into learning the language. He kept a handwritten note in his pocket of the 24 Greek letters alongside his own phonetic pronunciations of their names (veta for beta, pee for pi, ghama for gamma); he used these to title works in the series.
But he did not make these works abroad. “In Greece he sculpted, in New York he painted,” De Salvo explained. ‘Well,’ said Guidelli-Guidi with a laugh, ‘in Greece he was mostly spearfishing. And then he also did some sculpture.”
Whitten, who died in 2018, felt a strong connection to the country, where as a black man he found a measure of liberation from the oppressive racial politics of the United States. But he explained his use of the alphabet in a letter to a friend as a way “to deter any particular romantic or emotional involvement with titles.”
“It’s always an objective system in a sense, even if you want to read into it,” De Salvo said.
De Salvo characterized the task of tracking down the paintings as “a bit of a detective thing”. While a handful of prominent public collections had been included—including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Whitney—many works had been sold or given to friends. Whitten exchanged one with his accountant to pay the tax return. The Salvo saw one in a photo that appeared in DailyExpertNews in 2021 and hung in the study of Ray McGuire, the Wall Street executive and former New York City mayoral candidate. (That painting, “Pee III,” is included in the show.) The curators hope others will resurface after the Dia:Beacon exhibit as collectors realize what they have on their walls.
Martin expects the show to open eyes. “Even among the people who know a lot about Jack, none of us have seen all those paintings together until now,” she said. “The only disappointment for me in all this is that Jack isn’t here to tell us what we don’t know about these works.”
Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet series
Through July 10 at Dia:Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, NY; 845-440-0100; diaart.org.
