Jazzed About Abstraction: Jack Whitten’s Show Is a Peak MoMA Moment

Over nearly six decades, this fantastically inventive artist experimented with paint, turning it into a sculptural medium. Our critic calls his survey “scintillating and sweeping.”

“I’m a product of American Apartheid,” the artist Jack Whitten wrote, a blunt fact that led him to project, in his art, a very different reality, one of “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It was a vision that propelled and buoyed him through a nearly six-decade career. “This is why I get up in the morning,” he wrote, “and go to work!”

And how very lucky we are, at a moment when references to diversity and difference are being scrubbed from accounts of our national history, to have a refreshing tidal wave of a Whitten career retrospective sweeping and scintillating through the special exhibition galleries on the Museum of Modern Art’s sixth floor.

Titled “Jack Whitten: The Messenger,” the show encompasses some 180 paintings, sculptures and works on paper, from a 1963 art-school collage to a final painting from just before he died in 2018. Over that span Whitten called every studio he worked in a “laboratory,” and every piece of art he made an “experiment.” And, indeed, much of what’s in the show challenges ready definition.

Such is the case with a piece called “The Messenger (for Art Blakey)” installed just outside the first gallery. From a distance it could be a photograph of a star-drenched night sky, or of clouds of foam on a dark sea. Or it could a painting with white paint glopped and dripped, Abstract Expressionist-style, on a black ground. Get close and you find that, in fact, it’s a large rough-textured mosaic pieced together from thousands of pixel-like cubes of dried paint.

You consult the title for meaning: Art Blakey, Black drummer extraordinaire, leader in the 1950s of the hardbop group called the Jazz Messengers. Suddenly the glops and drips look sonic, like musical bursts and pings.