Jack Whitten

Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA

- Zoë Hopkins

I need a new word. The trouble with calling these works ‘paintings’ is that the term cannot convey or contain what Jack Whitten was doing with paint. The pieces on view in ‘The Messenger’ – Whitten’s retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York – exceed painting: they reach past the medium, live beyond its edges. In these paintings-that-exceed-painting, we find a study of movement and physics; a discourse on photo theory; a language and a philosophy of language; a music. Above all, we find ourselves with inquiry, within ongoing and open questions. Throughout the show, surprises lie everywhere in wait. How delightful it is to be gripped and renewed by them.

The force of this unpredictability is immediate: next to the entrance of the first gallery are Whitten’s ‘grey paintings’ from 1964, his attempt to wade through the pained psychic waters that followed the explosion of anti-Black brutality in the early 1960s. Here, the artist streaked black and white paint over a canvas, pressed a mesh cloth over the painted surface and then used a scraper to sweep away the resulting excess. What emerges is a blur of uncanny ambiguity and quiet violence: in Head IV Lynching, for example, a spectral figure appears to haunt the canvas from underneath its surface, streaking it with a fulguration of anguished motion. From the ingenuity of technical experiment rises a convulsion of affect, a pathos that writhes and roils.

This is the gift of ‘The Messenger’: we witness time and again the artist’s openness to surprising not only his viewers but also himself through an unflinching insistence on metamorphosis. Whitten constantly invented new risks for himself, followed his materials over the edge of experimentation and leapt with them toward the not-yet-known. In his studio log (later published as