Stanley Whitney - 20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session New York Wednesday, November 16, 2022 | Phillips

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  • "I always had the color. I don’t know where it came from. My influences are many, from Titian to Edvard Munch to textiles, and the color comes from all kinds of places."
    —Stanley Whitney
    The colors of Stanley Whitney’s Blue in Green, 2005, dance across the canvas as the eye tries to keep up. One shade of blue picks up another; elsewhere, green fights red, and planes of pigment that luxuriate in their hue meet their chromatic counterparts across the canvas. Typical of Whitney’s post-2000 work, Blue in Green takes color as its subject matter. While the artist’s obsession with color was aways been present, it was only in the early 2000s that color emerged as his foremost agent for formal exploration.


    Whitney asks, “How could I lay two colors so close to each other and not trap them, but rather allow air for the canvas to breathe?”i In Blue in Green, his preoccupation with this question is fruitfully displayed. A bright red horizon line splices the canvas, meeting green rectangles at either end. The influence of color theorists like Josef Albers is clearly felt, though while Albers treated color like science, Whitney understands it as a feeling, nearly musical in its intuitiveness. The complementary colors in the present example make each hue seemingly sing louder.

     

    Endeavoring to understand the full extent of Whitney’s influences brings us, perhaps unexpectedly, to Edward Munch. Munch’s Self-portrait between the clock and the bed offers an excellent example of the sort of 20th century color treatment that inspired Whitney. The Norwegian artist’s influence was so strong that Whitney even titled a 1997 painting in homage, After Munch. In Munch’s self-portrait, the artist’s face is highlighted in warm reddish oranges, positioned against the cooler blue and green tones of his apparel. The effect is one of measured chromatic contrast, the very type of ‘color stack’ that came to define Whitney’s work.

     

    Edward Munch, Self-portrait between the clock and the bed, 1940-43, Munch Museum, Oslo
    Edward Munch, Self-portrait between the clock and the bed, 1940-43, Munch Museum, Oslo. Image: Scala / Art Resource, NY

    "I want everything in the paintings—the complexity of the world."
    —Stanley Whitney
    If the color is the subject, the grid is the formal vehicle through which Whitney engages his exploration. When Whitney first saw Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie in 1968 he was led to recognize, as identified by Andrianna Campbell, “the ability of line to undermine the plane.”ii In contrast with his predecessor’s more formal structures, Campbell continues, Whitney’s works not grounded by the “anti-natural” or “timeless quality” that Rosalind Krauss famously ascribed to grids.iii In Blue in Green the grid guides the viewer up, down and across the color fields with a recurrent sense of movement and openness. Rather than adhering to strict geometric forms, colors overlap, lines flex and borders subtly bleed into one another. This is not the strict linear structure of a Mondrian, but a painting about freedom. Whitney makes the grid as naturally as he breaks it.

     

    Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3, Museum of Modern Art, New York
    Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie Woogie, 1942-3, The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Image: © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY

    i Stanley Whitney and Andrianna Campbell, “Stanley Whitney discusses painting and his show at the Studio Museum in Harlem,” Artforum, July 14, 2015, online
    ii Andrianna Campbell, Stanley Whitney: In the Color, exh. cat., Lisson Gallery, New York, 2018, p. 5
    iii Ibid., p. 12

    • Provenance

      esso gallery & books, New York
      Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2006

    • Artist Biography

      Stanley Whitney

      American • 1946

      Inspired by Renaissance painting, Minimalist sculpture and jazz music, Stanley Whitney’s oeuvre has become central to the current discourse of abstract painting in the contemporary era. Following recent solo exhibitions at the Modern Art Museum, Fort Worth and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, the 72-year-old artist has only just received the critical acclaim he deserves. After moving to New York from Philadelphia at the age of 22, Whitney aligned himself with the Color Field painters, often working in the shadows of his contemporaries including Frank Stella and Kenneth Noland. Throughout the decades that followed, however, the artist soon established himself as a key player in 20th century abstraction, traveling the world and gaining recognition not only in the studio, but also in the classroom, where he has taught Painting and Drawing at the Tyler School of Art for over 30 years. As such, Whitney’s influence extends to a generation of new artists exploring the formal tenants of painting today.

      As Lauren Haynes, curator of Whitney’s solo show at the Studio Museum in 2015, aptly wrote, “Whitney’s work interrogates the connections among colors, how they lead to and away from one another, what memories they are associated with…Whitney’s colors take on lives of their own. They evoke memory and nostalgia. This orange takes you back to your favorite childhood t-shirt; that blue reminds you of your grandmother’s kitchen. Whitney’s paintings remind us, on a universal scale, of the ability of color to trigger feelings and sensations.”

      View More Works

344

Blue in Green

titled and dated "3/2005 "Blue in Green"" on the reverse
oil on linen
40 x 40 in. (101.6 x 101.6 cm)
Painted in 2005.

Full Cataloguing

Estimate
$300,000 - 500,000 

Sold for $327,600

Contact Specialist

Patrizia Koenig
Specialist, Head of Day Sale, Afternoon Session
+1 212 940 1279
pkoenig@phillips.com

20th Century & Contemporary Art Day Sale, Afternoon Session

New York Auction 16 November 2022