MoMA’s Luminous Jack Whitten Show Is the Museum’s Best Retrospective in Half a Decade

Back in the mid-1960s, Jack Whitten went looking for light in painting. He was hardly the first painter to do so, because if you were to boil down the entire history of painting in the West into a single premise, describing it as one long investigation into how best to represent light wouldn’t be all that ludicrous. But surely, there are few other painters across time who have come across illumination via music. And yet, that’s exactly what happened when he met the jazz musician John Coltrane.

Fascinated by the ways that Coltrane could produce what Whitten called “sheets of sound” using a saxophone, Whitten set about creating “sheets of light” using paint. And he did so in works such as Light Sheet I (1964), an abstraction in which an expansive pink square is inset with tinier ones in shades of black and green—a format recalling Josef Albers’s color studies formed from contrasting parallelograms. Made by screenprinting acrylic paint onto canvas via a contraption roped to the ceiling of Whitten’s studio, Light Sheet I has a camouflage-like coloration that suggests a flood of illumination emerging from a dark void, a glow from within.

For Whitten, one of the great painters of the past half century, everything was light—people, places, paintings, all of it. He was less interested in depicting light than in embodying it in paint, no small task. “We know now that light occurs in extremely small particles,” he told me of his process for a 2016 ARTnews profile. “That’s what allows us to see—those little fucking photons bouncing around your retina, and blam-o, I can see!”

Blam-o, indeed. Whitten’s word rang through my mind as I walked through his luminous retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, whose sixth floor is now filled with around 175 of his pieces (plus some sheets of sound, courtesy Ornette Coleman, Miles Davis, and others, whose music plays throughout the galleries). But unlike many painting shows at MoMA, those works—mostly paintings, along with a smattering of sculptures and some prints—don’t just hang there, inert. They sparkle, shine, gleam, and dazzle, sending those little photons right back at you in a way that can only be described as thrilling.

Somewhere in the middle of the show, there’s its crown jewel: the majestic, 20-foot-long 9.11.01 (2006), in which a gigantic black triangle emerges from a white ground, sending out plumes of smoke on either side. The tragedy of 9/11 is obliquely depicted here—there are two barely-there grey towers in the background, but they only make themselves visible during prolonged viewing. It might seem weird to describe such a tragedy as bright or brilliant. But Whitten himself spoke of witnessing a “chandelier of glass” raining down outside his Tribeca studio that day, and this painting’s unevenly laid acrylic chips glint in the light. Even though its surface contains matter that Whitten personally salvaged from the World Trade Center’s wreckage, 9.11.01 still manages to shimmer.

Head one gallery over, and marvel before Black Monolith VIII (For Maya Angelou), a 2015 painting that does not actually depict the titular poet, even though the work’s name suggests a portrait. Instead of Angelou’s face, we get an oval-shaped mass of gnarled black elements ringed by a frame of acrylic chips, some lustrous, others rougher-hewn. From afar, those chips, arranged like the glass tiles of a mosaic, reflect back light. From up close, the painting’s black core glitters in shades of magenta. It’s a work that coruscates in ways not unlike its subject and its maker.

This is the best MoMA retrospective in the last five years and, by my calculations, the first big one devoted to an abstract painter at this museum in quite some time. (It’s also a rarity, in that MoMA, an institution once known for its painting retrospectives, has only occasionally conferred such an honor upon Black artists working in this medium.) Curated by Michelle Kuo with Dana Liljegren, Eana Kim, David Sledge, and Kiko Aebi, the Whitten show is the kind of no-frills retrospective that MoMA does best. It’s spacious and unfussy, starting at the beginning of Whitten’s career and finishing with his death in 2018, with little of the overbearing exhibition design that’s become common in New York museums.

The show’s first galleries, filled with early works, are its strongest ones. One of the earliest works here, a painting called Birmingham 1964 that was made that year, when the artist was in his mid-20s, features a picture borrowed from a newspaper reporting on a protest in Alabama the year before. (In the exhibition’s catalog, a book as rich with insight as the show itself, art historian Sampada Aranke identifies this picture as one of the 15-year-old Walter Gadsden, who survived being attacked by police dogs and became well-known within the civil rights movement.) With its appropriated photographic imagery, Birmingham 1964 looks quite unlike what Whitten would produce in abstraction, but it is in many ways the key to understanding his oeuvre.

Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, a city not far from Birmingham. Coal mines proliferated there; his father worked at one, hacking away at the earth to discover black anthracite. Think of Birmingham 1964, then, as a tribute to his dad’s profession, with Whitten excavating its inky surface to expose what lies beneath. Out of all this darkness comes light: the black foil’s silvery underbelly scintillates.

There was no small amount of darkness surrounding Whitten during his childhood. Jim Crow loomed large in the Deep South, keeping him and his family out of certain schools, buses, and museums, and disenfranchisement was a constant. Yet his family resisted their circumstances: his mother, a seamstress, helped other Black members of their community prepare for voter literacy tests, and later gained her son a scholarship at the Tuskegee Institute in 1957. He served as a cadet in the Air Force Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, then made his way to New York the year after that.

Abstract Expressionism, a painterly movement that trumpeted drippy strokes and flat canvases, was still in vogue when Whitten enrolled at Cooper Union in 1960. Some of Whitten’s art of the that decade has an Ab-Ex–lite quality, with smears of purple and squiggles of orange, but it’s clear that Whitten didn’t think he was working in a formalist vacuum, as painters like Jackson Pollock did. The title of Whitten’s painting Martin Luther King’s Garden (1968), a gorgeous tangle of indigo, teal, and carroty strokes, is a direct reference to the assassinated civil rights leader, whom Whitten had met roughly a decade earlier at a protest in Montgomery.

The joy of this retrospective is watching Whitten find himself, slowly pulling away from the oil-on-canvas formula he’d used in Martin Luther King’s Garden. He’d already used a thin mesh and layers of wet acrylic, a paint made partly from plastic that dries much quicker than oil, to craft works resembling wisps of smoke in a black ether. But he seemed to always revert right back to safer formats—partly, he told me, because his dealer at the time, Allan Stone, wouldn’t show the more experimental pieces.

Whitten’s breakthrough came in 1970, the year he began making paintings using a tall tool known as the Developer, which he would run across canvases lain on the floor that Whitten slathered thick with paint. That he called the tool the Developer—it’s on view as part of the MoMA show—seems like no coincidence. The device’s name aligns his art with photography, a medium that is itself reliant upon light.

The works made with the Developer look a bit like figures exceeding a slow shutter’s grasp: Prime Mover (1974) has black and white tones that have been smeared, as though this blurry work were trying to capture someone or someone who just wouldn’t stay still. But if photographs are flat, containing only the illusion of depth, Whitten’s paintings are three-dimensional. Some from this era contain ⅜ of an inch of paint.

His paintings became increasingly textured, with sculpted grooves and warps that generate their own intriguing lighting effects. To make the triangular canvas Homage to Malcolm (1970), Whitten moved an Afro pick through still-wet layers of black, blue, green, and red, leaving behind unsettled ridges in the painting’s surface. In doing so, he “raked light,” Whitten once said, as though he were harvesting a precious resource. Then, nearly a decade later, Whitten spoke of “weaving the light” for a painting called Ascension I (1979), a patchwork of squares crafted from wavy black lines, with the white of the canvas left visible between them.

Whitten was attracted to screens—paintings in the MoMA show use abstraction to recall those of TV sets, computer monitors, and iPhones. But the more successful works of the ensuing years reach beyond our digital age, returning to the heyday of religious art, which was itself always concerned with light. He crafted at least one painting resembling an icon—a 1988 memorial to Jean-Michel Basquiat that includes a gold-leafed frame—and, starting in the ’90s, he frequently referenced mosaics at monasteries he visited abroad, remaking their tesserae in dried acrylic paint.

One of the last works in this show, a 2008 painting called Self-Portrait: Entrainment, is done in that style. He offers up two sunglass lenses surrounded by radiating rows of grey. Standing far away from this painting, you might notice the faint outline of a figure (Whitten’s, perhaps) beneath. But it’s the eyes that have it here. You get the sense nearly five decades after he started working, Whitten was still staring into the sun, ready to take in all the light it had to offer.