Maybe the most important American artist you’ve never heard of

An installation view of “Jack Whitten: The Messenger.” Jonathan Dorado/Museum of Modern Art NEW YORK — To the extent that he was patronized, overlooked, thwarted and minimized until just before the end of his life, only to be feted with museum retrospectives now that he is dead, you could argue that Jack Whitten was an exemplary 20th-century artist. But that thought is too depressing.

Whitten (1939-2018) did receive recognition during his lifetime, including a traveling retrospective in 2014 and a National Medal of Arts awarded by President Barack Obama in 2016. But only now, seven years after his death, it is clear that we should have been paying more attention, much earlier. The euphoric occasion for such melancholy reflection is “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” a Museum of Modern Art retrospective opening Sunday (through Aug.



2). The show was organized by Michelle Kuo, a curator who put Whitten’s work on the cover of Artforum in 2012 when she was the magazine’s editor in chief. As you move among MoMA’s large, elegantly subdivided galleries, wonder swells in mesmerizing waves that thicken and fold in on themselves.

Up on the surface, much of Whitten’s art has a reticent, almost aloof appearance. Yet he could hardly have been more stimulated by the dirty, hands-on business of making art. He carved, splattered, sprayed, scraped, hammered and excavated.

Installation view of “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” showing Whitten’s “9.11.01.

” Jonathan Dorado/Museum of Modern Art Whitten was an abstract painter whose work was drenched in content. Drawn to the implications of photography and digitization, especially as they affected the deluge of images in everyday life, he was also attuned to the dynamics of mourning and memory. One giant work, on which he spent nearly five years, memorializes the events of Sept.

11, 2001, which he witnessed from his downtown Manhattan studio. (“What I saw will haunt me forever,” he admitted.) From the beginning, Whitten’s work was immersed in racial politics.

“I grew up in an American apartheid,” he said. “Every aspect of my life was dictated by race.” He not only lived through but participated in the Civil Rights Movement.

The strange part, really, is that the abstract artists receiving the high accolades during this same era all made a point of having no subject, no content, no politics — only form. (Thanks, Clement Greenberg.) Born in Bessemer, Alabama, Whitten was the son of a seamstress and a coal miner.

In his teens, he took to jazz (he played the tenor saxophone) and art, twin interests that sustained him for the rest of his life. In 1957, when he was a premed student at the Tuskegee Institute, Whitten went to Montgomery to hear a speech by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

When, six years later, King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Whitten was there for that, too. By then he had forsaken medicine and enrolled as an art student, first in Baton Rouge and then — after fleeing the escalating rancor in the South — at Cooper Union in New York City. Arriving in 1960, he immersed himself in the downtown jazz and art scenes, watching Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Art Blakey improvise at the Five Spot and Birdland and befriending the likes of Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Nam June Paik, Andy Warhol, and fellow Black artists Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence and Norman Lewis.

Jack Whitten, “Birmingham 1964,” 1964, aluminum foil, newsprint, stocking and oil on board. John Berens/Jack Whitten Estate/Hauser & Wirth Over the course of his career, Whitten made dozens of works intended as monuments to the dead, including a series of tributes to King. The 1963 bombing by white supremacists of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham and the 1965 assassination of Malcolm X had both provoked Whitten to make memorial works.

“Birmingham 1964” is a riveting little object — a kind of artwork as semi-scabbed-over wound, emanating pulses of soul-ache. “Homage to Malcolm,” meanwhile, was an early salvo in Whitten’s astonishing career (completely ignored during his lifetime) as a sculptor. He made most of his sculptures during summer months he spent annually in a fishing village in Greece, after his 1968 marriage to Mary Staikos.

They combine carved and polished wood with nails, copper, marble, lead, acrylic, fishing wire, photographs, circuit boards and sundry detritus. By the end of the 1960s, ideas about what constituted important art were fanning out almost frantically, fueled by a hot market and rolling social tumult. The warm, almost sensuous rhetoric of authenticity surrounding abstract expressionism had been plunged into an acid bath of skepticism.

Romantic self-expression was supplanted by creativity in a cooler key: the spilled-paint abstractions of the color field painters; the deadpan vacancy of the pop artists; the minimalists intrigued by systems, processes and industrial materials; and the conceptualists focused on ideas, politics and critique. How was a Black artist from Alabama, who revered the likes of De Kooning and Norman Lewis but could see that art’s “old road” (Bob Dylan) was “rapidly agin’,” to navigate all this? Jack Whitten, “The Pariah Way,” 1973, acrylic on canvas. Jack Whitten Estate/Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University I think it was both the precariousness of Whitten’s predicament and his willingness to grapple openheartedly with every dimension of what pressed in on his nerve endings that allowed him to safeguard his originality.

He was an unusually “pure” artist in this sense. He may have enjoyed more worldly success had he picked one path. But he had no interest in churning out branded “product.

” In 1970, Whitten turned his studio into a working laboratory. He began pouring liquid acrylic paint onto horizontal surfaces, then dragging various implements across the surface to create unpredictable, semi-mechanized effects. To do this he had to invent a tool he called “the Developer” (he liked the associations with photography).

It was a triangular armature connected to a 12-foot-long bar with which, in a single action, he could rake paint across the surface of a large canvas. To create different effects, he attached various implements to the bar, including toothed saws and Afro combs. When he attached neoprene, it became a giant squeegee, creating gorgeous air pockets and tears in the stretched-thin paint, revealing underlayers in different hues.

This was a decade before Germany’s Gerhard Richter made similar use of squeegees. Whitten’s paintings tend to be less chromatically rich than Richter’s. But among his triumphs from 1973 are two flat-out masterpieces: “Asa’s Palace” and “The Pariah Way.

” Dismayingly, while Richter’s career took off, these works remained rolled up in Whitten’s studio for the next 40 years. Whitten produced his most electrifying body of work in the wake of a two-day artist’s residency at the Xerox Corporation in Rochester, New York, where he experimented with electrostatic printmaking. Jack Whitten, “The Afro American Thunderbolt,” 1983-1984, black mulberry wood with copper plate and nails.

Genevieve Hanson/Jack Whitten Estate/Hauser & Wirth Back in his own studio, he embarked on a black-and-white series he called “Greek Alphabet.” He combined his dragging technique with various “disruption” strategies (objects placed on or beneath the work’s support to impede the movement of the dragged paint). The resulting paintings, at once subtle and dense, merge orderly stripes with surface “static.

” The “disruptions” recall the degraded images of photocopies or early television, but they also take on their own, separate life, evoking cuneiform, Arabic calligraphy or dissident codes leaking out from behind an authoritarian order. The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired one of these works in 1975 and another came into MoMA’s collection in 1978. But Whitten remained peripheral, and worried he was being patronized: “The Metropolitan can say ‘Look, we have one!’” he wrote.

“Does this represent a special category for me? The most accepted black abstract artist?” In 1985, after a brief return to easel painting, Whitten branched off in yet another direction. He created molds from found objects (grates, manhole covers, shoe soles) and into these poured colored or translucent acrylic paint, sometimes combined with blood, broken eggshells and various other substances. Jack Whitten, “Mirsinaki Blue,” 1974, acrylic on canvas.

Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University He used these casts, along with hardened slabs of acrylic paint that he cut into tiles, to make complex mosaics that served as memorials to departed Black heroes and friends – among them James Baldwin, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Maya Angelou and Thelonious Monk. With these semi-sculptural methods, he created his overwhelming memorial to 9/11 and, no less convincing, a 2014 work called “Atopolis: For Édouard Glissant.

” This astonishing, eight-panel masterpiece, honoring the Martinican writer and philosopher, resembles an aerial view of a great metropolis or possibly a war zone. What makes Whitten remarkable is more than just his embrace of ambiguity or his technical experimentation. It’s his ability to use abstraction to create palimpsests of poetic meaning, inspired by jazz and hyper-attuned to the implications of modern communication.

His penchant for stripes and surface striations evokes not only the binary language of coding but also the fluctuations of identity – the games of self-exposure and concealment, of memory and forgetting, that are at the heart of every life. What do you remember? Whom do you forget? Whitten, who understood that the answers to these questions are almost never accidental, had a feeling for the uncanny border zone between meaning and nihilism. His works look museum-ready and archivally secure, but they seem to simultaneously sink back into the disorder of everyday life, as a ruin sinks into a landscape.

Walking out onto 53rd Street, I blinked and tried to adjust but found I was still seeing through Jack Whitten’s eyes. “Jack Whitten: The Messenger” Through Aug. 2 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

We believe it’s important to offer commenting on certain stories as a benefit to our readers. At its best, our comments sections can be a productive platform for readers to engage with our journalism, offer thoughts on coverage and issues, and drive conversation in a respectful, solutions-based way. It’s a form of open discourse that can be useful to our community, public officials, journalists and others.

Read more...

We do not enable comments on everything — exceptions include most crime stories, and coverage involving personal tragedy or sensitive issues that invite personal attacks instead of thoughtful discussion. For those stories that we do enable discussion, our system may hold up comments pending the approval of a moderator for several reasons, including possible violation of our guidelines. As the Maine Trust’s digital team reviews these comments, we ask for patience.

Comments are managed by our staff during regular business hours Monday through Friday and limited hours on Saturday and Sunday. Comments held for moderation outside of those hours may take longer to approve. By joining the conversation, you are agreeing to our commenting policy and terms of use .

More information is found on our FAQs . You can modify your screen name here . Show less Please sign into your Press Herald account to participate in conversations below.

If you do not have an account, you can register or subscribe . Questions? Please see our FAQs . Your commenting screen name has been updated.

Send questions/comments to the editors..