Stanley Whitney - Editions & Works on Paper New York Tuesday, April 16, 2024 | Phillips
  • “It’s not just formal for me—color has great depth; it can bring up great emotion and immense feeling.”
    —Stanley Whitney

    Within the structure of the grid, Stanley Whitney finds endless expressive variations while inventing a visual language that elicits immediate recognition and an overarchingly cohesive oeuvre. Color is the unequivocal leader in all his compositions, and the artist’s Stay Songs monotypes, made during his residency at the Vermont Studio Center, aptly reflect the spirited and multifaceted qualities of color. Whitney’s structure simply acts as the vessel for what the color wants to be, and each time the choice is different. He describes how he initially struggled with his intentions to center color in his work: “For a long time, my difficulty was how to make color the subject because the way we were taught is that color supports content.”i

     

    Whitney traveled to Rome to live and work for a period in the 1990s. Surrounded by its abundance of linear columns and imposing ancient stone structures, he found his compositional style. Yet he further finds a freedom in such structures through his focus on colors presented as undulating rectangles. A colleague and collaborator of Whitney’s, poet Norma Cole writes of his work, “Color becomes its text, its object, scription, not description…Colors seem to know each other in ways words are not able.”ii She also composed a series of five poems inspired by Whitney entitled Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney. The fifth concludes the series below:

     

    There will be 

    time

    then

    there will be

    song

     

    for the paintings

    say

    stayiii

     

    The melody in Cole’s poems evokes the swing of music inherently applied through the monotype’s title. Always playing the experimental jazz of Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman in his studio, the interplay of changing colors and varying rectangles reflects the sonal influence of its improvisational rhythm. Just as jazz launches from the bones of a melody and improvises upon it, Whitney begins with the grid, the groundwork of his compositions and lets the colors flow through him. The artist explains, “I start at the top and work down. That gets into call-and-response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way round.”iv The grid has been utilized by countless artists throughout art history, notably in the 20th century by Dutch painter Piet Mondrian. Upon his first encounter with Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1968, Whitney was immediately drawn to its illusion of the blues filling the streets of New York City in the 1940s. Its visual tones, though constricted by their palette of red, yellow, and blue, dance on the canvas. Whitney finds a similar liveliness in his restriction of structure by embracing the variability of his colors and letting them sing. 

     

    Piet Mondrian, Broadway Boogie-Woogie, 1942-43, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

     

    Stanley Whitney, interviewed by Adrianna Campbell, “New York, New York,” Artforum, July 14, 2015. 

    ii Norma Cole, “Singularities: The Painting of Stanley Whitney,” in To Be At Music: Essays & Talks, p. 130-32. 

    iii Norma Cole, “Stay Songs for Stanley Whitney, #5,” in Fate News, p. 71.

    iv “Stanley Whitney, About,” Gagosian Gallery, https://gagosian.com/artists/stanley-whitney/#id_more

    • 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

142

Stay Songs

2001
Monotype in oil, on wove paper, with full margins.
I. 17 3/4 x 18 in. (45.1 x 45.7 cm)
S. 29 1/4 x 29 3/8 in. (74.3 x 74.6 cm)

Signed and dated in pencil, co-published by the artist and Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont (with their and the printer's blindstamps), unframed.

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Estimate
$10,000 - 15,000 

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