Jack Whitten
The Museum of Modern Art | 11 West 53 Street
Through August 2, 2025
Jack Whitten sits among the highest order in the pantheon of the art gods—at least for now, in the Museum of Modern Art’s top-floor gallery. Ever since the $450 million-dollar expansion completed in 2019, MoMA has felt disorienting, usually crowded, and vague in its too-much-of-a-good-thing dispersion, leading the visitor to feel as if they are stumbling through its unmatched collection. (It’s less than half the size of the Met and somehow more difficult to navigate.) Yet, there are few better art experiences to be had in the world than a great MoMA exhibition in this sixth-floor space, which provides the sprawling museum its reassuring beacon.
With “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” composed of nearly 200 objects, mostly paintings, MoMA’s curator at large, Michelle Kuo, has organized one of the best in a series of reliably great exhibitions on this upper level. Posthumous career retrospectives don’t get much better.
Walking through the show, I almost immediately began thinking about the Alabama-born artist’s legacy in the context of two other similarly ambitious surveys in the past five years at peer New York institutions, about comparable, restlessly inventive artists: “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” 2020, and “Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror,” 2021-22. The Richter show, staged at the Met’s temporary Breuer-building expansion, was open for only about a week, running from March 4–12, closing early with the onset of the pandemic. The Johns show couldn’t be contained at the Whitney Museum alone, with a second part concurrently shown at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Whitten, who died in New York in 2018 at the age of 78, was boundlessly experimental in his practice. For him, the canvas, as it is for Johns, was a site of actions and operations, often with tools extending well beyond mere paint brushes, which Whitten largely abandoned using by the 1970s.
The first artworks on view, displayed on the wall outside the first gallery, are The Messenger (For Art Blakey), 1990, and Homecoming: For Miles, 1992. Each painting consists of a black ground splattered with white paint that Whitten then cut into a grid and rearranged, resulting in an image that challenges the viewer’s intuitive understanding of how the splatter surfaces were achieved. (Mosaic compositions figure prominently in Whitten’s work from the 1990s onward, for which he used squares of dried acrylic “tesserae” to achieve a ceramic effect.) It’s an intriguing, even riddle-like, start to an ingeniously curated show, which is arranged largely chronologically, but—as with this beginning—continually provides the viewer with sneak peeks of what is ahead. The result is a fuller, more nuanced, view of the artist’s oeuvre.
This opening pair of images chime with a constellation of five pictures in the first gallery, all acrylic on fabric or foam from 1964. Their vaporous white-on-black compositions look like grisaille companions to the distorted portraits Francis Bacon was creating of George Dyer that same year, stripped down to a more spectral, diaphanous register. This more diminutive work sits across and nearby Whitten’s foray into what looks like Ab-Ex grand gestures, as in Light Sheet I, 1969. Despite appearing like the result of expressive brushstrokes, the layered image was achieved by extruding acrylic paint through screens, a process that brought painting closer to the mechanical image-rendering of photography. Even for someone already familiar with Whitten’s work, these early forays and later minor works (like his experiments with copy-machine toner on paper) may be revelations.
One of Whitten’s signature tools, the Developer, stands leaning against the wall in the second gallery, like an enormously wide push broom without bristles. The artist used this impressive implement to sweep acrylic paint across the surfaces of his canvases in a single gesture. This approach recalls Jasper Johns’s Device, 1961-62, from a decade earlier, an oil-on-canvas work whose semi-circular portions were created by two wooden slats left attached to the canvas, each rotated like the hand of a clock to push paint in an arc across its surface. But more than any other works, Whitten’s canvases made with the Developer recall the squeegee paintings of Gerhard Richter.
The importance of the timeline here cannot be overstated: Jack Whitten made his version of squeegee paintings before Gerhard Richter’s more famous ones. There are superb examples of Whitten’s here, like Opos Dipote, with its wondrous reds and blues, and Asa’s Palace, with its pinks and yellows, both from 1973. Whitten went on to elaborate this method in different directions than Richter, with his raked paintings, composed of a series of nearly uniform, usually horizontal lines. And further still, to overlay vertical and horizontal lines into gridded or woven constructions. In the tondo format of Four Wheel Drive, 1970, concentric grooves suggest a giant record on the wall, encoding color rather than sound. The grid of Self Portrait, 1979, reveals the artist from the shoulders up as if by optical illusion, forever on the cusp of resolution as you move closer or farther away—its image recognizable yet elusive. The fourth gallery holds numerous stunning raked paintings that adhere mostly to stark grayscale. Accompanying them is an array of works on paper, as well as tools the artist used to mark his surfaces, the smaller ones resembling the comb of an Afro pick, which he called “small developers.”
While the major pandemic-era Richter retrospective at the Met Breuer closed nearly as soon as it was opened, his four “Birkenau Paintings,” 2014, were then shown at the Met’s Fifth Avenue location, in a small gallery along with the images upon which they were based—a series of photographs secretly taken by a prisoner at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in 1944. Soon after seeing them, I described these in The Paris Review as documenting Richter essentially painting over atrocity without adding any insight, only undercutting the power and witness of the original pictures. I had always loved Richter’s squeegee paintings—one of the most accomplished painters of his generation, stripping the painting down to delight in paint-into-paint pleasure and the unpredictable characteristics and viscosity of his medium. Even ranking them as more or less successful was part of the fun. But these paintings at the Met struck me then as failures—conceptual wrecks.
I thought about these Richters as I considered the politics in the Whitten show. It isn’t first and foremost a political show. It’s a revelatory look at one of the most innovative American painters of the second half of the 20th century, in the vein of the 2021-22 Johns exhibition. And it’s proof that Whitten deserves a stage equal to Richter and Johns. (Johns too was born a Southerner—raised in South Carolina on a working farm—an illuminating biographical contrast from across the color line of Jim Crow segregation.) But when Whitten reckons with history, he succeeds where Richter fails.
In her catalogue essay for the show, Kuo offers a sort of origin story for Whitten’s life as an artist—an unlikely fate for a Black child born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939. His mother’s first husband, a commercial sign-painter who died prior to Whitten’s birth, left behind the tools of his trade, which Whitten later utilized to begin his own art career. For one of his first paid gigs, the young painter hand-lettered signs for a Civil Rights protest outside of a county courthouse.
In this way, politics and the ongoing Civil Rights struggle are integral to Whitten’s coming to art. And these concerns are made explicit throughout his career in works like Birmingham, 1964, which features at its center a newspaper photograph of police dogs attacking non-violent Black protestors, and in Totem 2000 IV: For Amadou Diallo, dedicated to the Guinean student fatally shot by New York police in 1999. In this mosiac construction, Whitten intermixes his own blood, animal blood, and black pigment in clear acrylic gel. The show doesn’t demote the importance of politics in Whitten’s art; it presents his political thinking and processing alongside the continual technical innovations that pushed his work forward. Whitten was ever mindful of peers in the visual arts, but also always looking to the model provided by Jazz musicians, who often feature in his titles and dedications. Even as an innovator and technician, Whitten was always painting through history, incorporating it within his compositions, never overpainting it.
During this time of the DEI hysteria of the current Trump administration, including outrageous attempts at erasing Black history, it is especially satisfying to see this Whitten exhibition at the very top of one of the world’s great museums. Here is an artist pushing unrelentingly at the limits of his medium, and breaking through.
