Red Sung

Spanning over 1.5 metres in height and width, Red Sung (2016) is an exuberant large-scale painting that glows with Stanley Whitney’s unique sense of colour, touch and light. For almost three decades, Whitney has worked in the same format: a square surface divided into four unequal horizontal bands, which are each themselves filled with bright banners of colour, and divided by smaller strips the width of the artist’s brush. Within these outwardly limited tactics, he achieves an extraordinary freedom, playing lyrically among endless notes of colour, translucency and texture. Red Sung’s chromatic blocks range from the titular red—which underlines the painting, and stands to the left next to a warm yellow—to leafy greens, rich oranges, teals, turquoises and a beam of deep blue. Whitney paints freehand from top to bottom, responding to each colour in turn in an improvisatory ‘call and response’ approach. Indeed, as Red Sung’s title implies, music is a key organisational component to Whitney’s work, which can be understood in terms of rhythm, resonance, syncopation and harmony, with each painting an individual variation on a never-ending theme. With a major solo exhibition at the Palazzo Tiepolo Passi during the 2022 Venice Biennale, and a career retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Museum that concluded in May 2024, Whitney has taken his place as one of America’s greatest living abstract artists.

Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946, and studied at the Kansas City Art Institute before arriving in 1968 in New York, where he became a favourite student of Philip Guston’s on a summer program at Skidmore College. Immersed in the city’s art world at a time when Abstract Expressionism and Pop were giving way to Minimalism, he was drawn to the Colour Field painting advocated by Clement Greenberg, as well as the use of colour and structure in the work of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. Robert Rauschenberg became a friend. Whitney, however, never felt at home among any particular New York ‘school’—not least because, as an African American artist, he was something of an outsider. Unlike his Colour Field contemporaries, he valued a sense of touch and the artist’s hand, and sought to draw upon the wider world in his painting rather than to depart from it. For all that his mature works might share with Judd’s bold colour-combinations or the Constructivism of Piet Mondrian—another painter, incidentally, with a strong interest in jazz music—they would take on an expressive, resounding sense of life that was entirely Whitney’s own.

In the early 1990s, Whitney and his wife left the United States to live in Italy for several years, and it was here—catalysed by inspirations as diverse as Giorgio Morandi’s metaphysical still lifes, the radiant Renaissance masterpieces of Botticelli, and the presence of classical architecture—that his art truly came together. The Roman Colosseum and the ancient trompe-l’oeil frescoes at Boscoreale outside Pompeii had a particular impact. Shifting him towards a frieze-like frontality free of foreground or background, these stimuli led to the colour-stacking system that defines Whitney’s paintings to this day. His works’ space and mass is architectural as much as pictorial. Like the nested squares of Josef Albers before him, Whitney’s strict format allows him a total focus on the symphonic interrelations, communications and potential of colour. In Red Sung, his palette strikes up a vibrant melody. ‘I can put down a red, which can then call a blue, then that blue might call a yellow,’ Whitney says. ‘… The colour has to go wherever it needs to go. That’s the exciting part of it, to discover what happens’ (S. Whitney, quoted in S. Tariq, ‘Stanley Whitney’, Glass Magazine, Issue 3, Autumn 2010, p. 187).