102
Jack Whitten
Her Majesty's Angle
- Estimate
- $150,000 - 200,000
Further Details
“I do not paint a painting. I make a painting.”—Jack Whitten
Jack Whitten’s Her Majesty’s Angle, 1980, transcends traditional painting methods. Known for his experimentation with and manipulation of painting as an art form, Whitten redefined abstraction while remaining deeply engaged with the legacy of African American history. Immersing himself into the predominantly white New York art world of the 1960s, Whitten established close connections with leaders of the Abstract Expressionist movement while forging strong relationships with pioneers of African American modernism, such as Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. These connections helped shape his distinct language of abstraction, blending influences from both his contemporaries and artistic forebearers to push the boundaries of painting. Whitten’s work has inspired artists such as Sam Gilliam, Melvin Edwards and Mark Bradford, and today, his legacy is being celebrated in his first comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, which will showcase all six decades of his career, running through August 2025.
Whitten’s work from the 1980s pushes the sculptural possibilities of painting, blending the two- and three-dimensional. This decade represented an “epoch of experimentation and regeneration, driven by his proclivity towards the cosmic and quantum,” testing various mediums and materials to perfect and pioneer his distinctive abstract language.i Her Majesty’s Angle uses form, color and texture to create depth within the abstract composition. Vibrant pinks, oranges and blues form geometric patterns in the center of the painting, layering atop one another to form a rainbow of shades. The painting’s eponymous “angle” is emphasized at center with dotted lines and a trapezoidal shape, highlighting Whitten’s connection to line and form even within an abstracted composition. The canvas is laid on a honeycomb panel, giving the galactic black background a tactile quality that embraces the panel’s natural bumps and grooves. This is further enhanced by raised circles and triangles, showing clear evidence of the artist’s hand. The present work exemplifies Whitten’s focus on the physicality of the artistic process for which he is well known. As the artist himself noted, “abstraction has enabled me to explore a wide range of knowledge and emotions without depending on narration. My art is an art of materiality. I deal with paint as matter. I do not paint a painting. I make a painting.”ii
i Jack Whitten. Transitional Space. A Drawing Survey: An Exhibition Guide by Decade, January 28, 2020, Hauser & Wirth, online.
ii Jack Whitten, Aghia Galini, Crete, Greece, July 2010.
Full-Cataloguing
Jack Whitten
American | B. 1939 D. 2018Jack Whitten, who passed away at age 78 in January 2018, is celebrated for his influential approach to painting. While initially aligned with the New York circle of Abstract Expressionists in the mid-1960s, particularly Willem de Kooning, Whitten became known for his focus on the experimental aspects of process and technique in painting. Fascinated with the materiality of painting at a time when the medium was deemed “dead”, Whitten in the early 1970s fervently sought an alternative approach to art making. He achieved his artistic breakthrough with what he called the “developer”, a proprietary floor-based tool that allowed him to quickly spread a layer of acrylic paint onto the canvas with a single gesture – resulting in his signature slab paintings. For the next five decades, Whitten relentlessly pushed his practice to new heights – bridging gestural abstraction with process art, mechanical automation with intensely personal expression.
His all-embracing vision led him to create works on such diverse themes as quantum physics and contemporary events, such as 9/11 or school shootings, as well as experiment with different media. While former President Barack Obama awarded Whitten the National Medal of Arts in 2016, he was profoundly under recognized by the mainstream art world for most of his 55-year career. Most recently, his sculptural output was subject to a major exhibition that travelled from the Baltimore Museum of Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 2018.