Leslie Wayne on Jack Whitten and the Greek Alphabet Paintings
Jack Whitten, Greek Alphabet, Installation at Dia:Beacon
It seems like a good time to think about Jack Whitten, just as his retrospective at MoMA has come down. He’s still on a lot of minds.
I know artists who studied with him and revered him, but somehow, and sadly, I had not entered his orbit. I only became truly aware of his work when, so late in life, he was picked up by Hauser and Wirth. The paintings he was making then, the huge, mostly black cut acrylic mosaic panels, were stunning in their size, intricacy and ambition. They were like constellations you could get lost in. But oddly I wasn’t particularly moved. They felt to me like the work of an artist who was up against the outsized pressures of time (his own) and space (the enormous gallery) , and so I didn’t think much about him after that. It wasn’t until 2022 when I made it up to DIA Beacon on the last day of his posthumous show, that I saw a body of work that literally took my breath away. I have not stopped thinking about those paintings since. And, with that, the wider world of Jack Whitten then opened up to me.
Whitten spent a lot of time in Greece, where he felt free of the constraints imposed on him by the art world and life in New York. He loved Greek history and culture and learned to speak the language. The Greek Alphabet Paintings, as he called them, 70 in all, 40 on display at DIA, marked a particularly fertile period in his life. Whitten was an extraordinarily adventurous and curious artist whose constant quest for invention caused him to change his work often, always in search of something new. But, to me, the Greek Alphabet series reflects a kind of fever pitch of creative innovation.
Jack Whitten, Eta Group IV, 1976
I don’t even know how to describe them, and I think that’s a large part of their appeal, which is that they are beyond language. They hover and shimmer and slip between image and abstraction, foreground and background, color and monochrome, opacity and transparency. Your eyes want to focus on them, but they keep blurring from the moiré effect of the raked lines which he made with his own hand-made tool he called the “developer.” Referring to the magical instantaneous process of photographic development, this giant rake dragged furrowed lines across the paint, creating an effect much like an old TV screen that has lost its signal but still projects flashes of something you think you recognize. Whitten was, as curator of the show Donna DeSalvo said, “channeling the screen as the urgent cultural interface of his time,” including everything from television and video to space photography, faxes, scans, x-rays and MRIs. These paintings have a sonic effect as well. They hum with a kind of white noise.
Whitten was deeply knowledgeable about art history, philosophy and literature, and was indebted to his AbEx and Minimalist predecessors. But clearly, he was looking for a way to rescue painting from the claws of the past, to free it from the pretensions of the Expressionist gesture while also filling the Minimalist void with content. He described what he was looking for as “a finger pressed against a mirror.” That mirroring of the self that you can’t fully see because you are in front of it.
Jack Whitten, Mee I, 1977
From Alpha to Omega, he set forth with an organizing principle that otherwise had no limitations on what he could do. In the end, he created a body of work that was truly Hermetic - at once a kind of prima materia whose alchemy was a miracle born out of the chaos of the cosmos and a fully intentional vision guided by his commitment to process. He invented a new language and gave it life but retained its mystery. Never to be repeated or replicated.
After that show, I went into the studio and spent months trying to recreate – not what he had done precisely – but what he had achieved in terms of personal innovation. To be constantly on the precipice of discovery through process. To have to build your own tool, like “the developer,” because you have a vision and can’t get what you want with the standard fare. To deliberately create conflict so that you have to climb your way through to a brilliant and unanticipated outcome. To go into the studio every day and never know what’s going to happen. What could be more thrilling than that?
Leslie Wayne, High Dive, 2023, oil on canvas with artist’s frame, 109 x 125 inches
Leslie Wayne is a New York based artist and is represented by Jack Shainman Gallery. Her upcoming solo exhibition in summer of 2026 for LMCC Arts Center on Governor’s Island is entitled The Unintended Blues and explores the dangers of sea level rise due to climate change.
