Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Jack Whitten
American; 20th-century
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Jack Whitten: The Messenger)
75%
Pink Psyche Queen. 1973. Acrylic on canvas
At his best — which is where a work like this one finds him — Whitten is an unrepentant late modernist trying mightily, à la Olitski or Ryman, to incorporate the idea and the essence of his paintings as objects into their effects as pictures. (Well, for Ryman it might actually usually have worked the other way around. But Whitten, unlike Ryman, is unambiguously a painter, not a maker of painting-objects.) In this piece, it's that strip at right of untreated canvas that does the work. But to reiterate, the upshot here isn't that the painting is thereby yanked out into the "expanded field" (or something like that) but rather that that edge becomes somehow pictorial — becomes incorporated into the coquetry of illusionistic depth that's going on on the painting's surface, between the pink haze and the heavy mess of color that's by turns beneath and blending with that pink. The bar of raw canvas ends up working pictorially in part because it amounts to a solid line, and there's hardly any linework in the painting-proper for it to be competing with. In part, it's because it's vertical against all the dragged horizontals to its right. In part, it's because it's not all that tonally dissimilar from the color’s main action. To the degree, however, that the unpainted strip is successful, it's also all a little disproportionate. One gets the sense that the whole of the painting is working for that band at its edge, and not the other way around. (Such disproportionality between parerga and the total work is present in much of Whitten's art.) (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Museum of Modern Art (Exhibition: Jack Whitten: The Messenger)
46%
Dead Reckoning I. 1980. Acrylic on canvas
Looks like a Torkwase Dyson, which is a bad thing. The linear, schematic elements seem to be lending order or structure to the black-and-colored miasmic field they're layered on top of, but without encroaching on the way in which that miasma struggles to make itself synonymous with the painting's surface. In other words, there are two mostly separate planes in this image, and both want to assert themselves as "figure" without becoming the other's "ground." It's a version of the same problem Whitten dealt with earlier in his career by, for instance, making palpable the objecthood of his canvases themselves, or by using odd tools to work up his surfaces so that so that the physical presence of his paintings would be nonidentical with the images it contains. These sort of "extra-painterly" approaches worked better for Whitten. This painting, to its detriment, is instead strictly pictorial. Its two layers are at once too alienated from each other and too imbricated to pull off the nonhierarchical figure-ground thing. (TFS, 2025)