Process, image and elegy: a number of exhibitions have lately turned the spotlight on Jack Whitten, whose 40-year career is a vital link between Ab-Ex painterliness and a more contemporary engagement with unorthodox processes and Internet inspirations

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Jack Whitten's paintings have been shown regularly since the late 1960s. He was recognized with both a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1974) and a 10-year retrospective at the Studio Museum in Harlem (1983). Yet Whitten remains an overlooked and only narrowly appreciated artist. I believe this is because his works tend to appear tangential to the dominant themes of their day, and only in hindsight does their pertinence come to be recognized. Now that the '70s are being reevaluated by historians, dealers, collectors, curators and younger artists--all searching for overlooked practitioners and alternative practices that do not neatly fit into the post-1945 modernist paradigm--Whitten's art has attracted fresh attention.

His work was included in two recent group shows that epitomize the revisionist current. "High Times, Hard Times: New York Painting 1967-1975" [see A.i,A., Sept. '07], a (still) touring exhibition curated by Katy Siegel for Independent Curators International, surveys the less easily categorized work that was overshadowed by the critical clash between Minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. "Energy/Experimentation: Black Artists and Abstraction, 1964-1980," curated for New York's Studio Museum in Harlem by Kellie Jones, brought together the work of 15 black artists who produced abstract art rather than the ethnocentric and politically engaged work advocated by the Black Arts Movement. (1) Three solo exhibitions, two in the fall of '07 and another opening next month, address different aspects of Whitten's 40-year career. A small sampling of his early figurative expressionist paintings from 1964-68, plus one monumental piece from 2006, were on view in New York at P.S.1, while Alexander Gray Associates showed representative works from the '70s as well as a group of recent paintings. The forthcoming "Memorial Paintings," an exhibition curated by Stuart Horodner at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, will examine how the theme of remembrance courses through Whitten's oeuvre regardless of changes in his process, esthetic and imagery. This will be the first major consideration of Whitten's work to take place in the South.

Born in 1939 and raised in Bessemer, Ala., Whitten grew up in the Old South of the '40s and '50s, and attended the Tuskegee Institute (now University), with the intention of becoming an Army doctor. His decision to be an artist arose from an epiphany of self-awareness and was an act of resistance to a social order intent on narrowly defining what he was and could be. Whitten went on to study art at Southern University in Baton Rouge. In 1959, inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr., Whitten participated in a major civil rights campaign, which first forced the university to close down and then expanded into a protest march through Baton Rouge to the State Capitol Building. The anger, hatred and violence that met this march so horrified Whitten that he realized he could no longer live in the South. In 1960 he left for New York to further his studies at Cooper Union, where he received his BFA in 1964.

[ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED]

The early 1960s were a good time to be a young artist in New York. Less preoccupied with money and fashion than today, the art world then was open to all corners, its social life revolving around gatherings at bars, studio parties and gallery openings. The Artists' Club, though no longer the central hub, continued to meet regularly in a loft over Rosenthal's Art Supply on 4th Avenue, and one could still go there to hear lively discussions on contemporary art and encounter veteran artists. As for the spectrum of political opinion, it ranged from the anarchist views of Barnett Newman and the progressive liberalism of Robert Motherwell to the hard-line communist views still held by some. Though divided by cliques, this art world was small, intimate and supplied young artists with not only a sense of community but access as well.

In this milieu, Whitten came to know not only significant African-American artists such as Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Bob Thompson, but also Willem de Kooning, who would play a crucial role in the younger painter's stylistic development--a paradox, since one driving ambition for artists of Whitten's generation was to define their own esthetic and declare their independence from the mythic figures associated with Abstract Expressionism. The options included post-painterly abstraction, Minimalism, Pop, and the nonexpressionist approaches of individual artists such as Ron Gorchov, Ralph Humphrey and Anne Truitt, whose work occupied the gap between Greenberg's process-oriented formalism and Minimalism's reductive industrial esthetic. What these approaches to painting (and art-making in general) shared was a sense of material literalism derived from Abstract Expressionism. In Whitten's case, the transition from figurative expressionism in the '60s to abstraction in the '70s reflects an internalization of these debates as well as his own highly personal, nonpartisan determination to use aspects of differing perspectives to continue to give expression to his feelings.