âMy environment is unnatural, unsensual, tough and uncompromising. Within this milieu I have decided to create my art. The painting is not the conduit. I am the conduit.â
Threadlike crests of tactile black and white acrylic are punctuated by striations of red and blue in Alpha Group III, representing Jack Whittenâs extraordinary technical and conceptual departure during the 1970s: painting without a paintbrush. Prominently exhibited in his watershed exhibition Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings at Dia Beacon, the present work is one of 60 known Greek Alphabet paintings executed between 1975-78, a series structured around the 24 letters of the Greek alphabet and born out of the artistâs rigorous process-based experimentation. Presently honored with a monumental retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, Jack Whitten is the subject of immense critical interest for his career-long investigations of mapping, messaging, and memory through abstraction. Further test.mes nt to the importance of the series in the artistâs oeuvre, other Greek Alphabet paintings reside in many of the most prominent institutional collects ions in the United States, including the Dallas Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Art Institute of Chicago, among others.
âA threefold movement of resistance-compression-release upholds the acrylic in an active forcefield, cohering as a complex picture plane of actual thickness. Displaced outside the canvas, drawing is no longer contour or autographic mark but rather verb, the action of drawing the serrated blade across the accidented surface. A single sweep reforms matter into space, an âemergent surfaceâ wherein the intentional patterns generated from the disruptors and the random ones occurring in the interaction of material layers act upon and through each other.â
Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, Whittenâs youth was contextualized by the witnessing of the horrors of a deeply segregated South and the decades of gradual progress that followed. Whitten was a promising student in the sciences and was briefly a pre-medical student at the Tuskegee Institute; during a drill call, he suddenly and radically announced his decision to pursue a career in art, soon after attending the Southern University and A&M College in Baton Rouge. In 1960, Whitten made the decision to relocate to New York City and pursue a BFA at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, finding himself in the city that he would live in for the rest of his life and would be his primary source of inspiration. Though initially immersed in the New York Schoolâs Abstract Expressionist concerns of aesthetics and form, Whitten gradually found himself gravitating towards questions of experimental process and technique. The paintings that followed interrogated the materiality of paint and explored a new dimensionality of painting by treating the medium as an independent object, from an intellectual position inspired by artists, musicians, and thinkers like Norman Lewis, John Coltrane, Ralph Ellison, and W.E.B. Du Bois. Socializing with Abstract Expressionism figureheads including Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Phillip Guston, along with African American modernism icons such as Romare Bearden, Jacob Lawrence, and Sam Gilliam, Whittenâs singular visual lexicon was a pioneering voice that broadened pathways both for the technical and theoretical boundaries of artmaking and the expressive legacies of the African American experience.
Jack Whittenâs Greek Alphabet Paintings in Institutional collects ions
Executed in 1975, the present work is among the very first Greek Alphabet paintings Whitten created a breakthrough according to the artistâs own admission: âAfter total exhaustionâflustrationânear panicâŠ. I experienced a major breakthrough. ⊠Do you have any idea of relief the soul experiences after such an ordeal?â (the artist quoted in: âStudio log, March 30, 1975,â in: Exh. Cat., Dia Beacon, Jack Whitten: The Greek Alphabet Paintings, 2023, p.168) The series consists of abstract compositions of predominantly black and white, made by pouring acrylic onto canvas and then raking it away with a tool Whitten developed in 1970 that he called the âDeveloperâ; often modified with blades, combs, or squeegees, the wooden device would pull and drag on the paint, leaving behind striped patterns characteristic to the series. Each Greek letter corresponds to a particular size and composition of the painting, varying depending on the letter. Yet, they are united in their grisaille palette and richly contoured surfaces that reverberate in a dense luminosity. Removing color from the palette and distilling the canvas to fluctuations of achromatic greys, Whitten at once condenses the Greek Alphabet paintings to a poignant stat.mes nt on both the sociopolitical circumstances of the era and the formal capacities of painting, as underscored in his recounting of a conversation with curator Henry Geldzahler: âI said, Henry, you have to understand that in getting rid of all the chroma and taking it to black and white is not just a formal exercise. Iâm very much aware of the meaning of black and white in American society, which informs who I am as an African American. The formal reasons for black and white are one thing but there are also the reasons coming out of the political situation, and I wanted to see if I could combine them.â (the artist quoted in: Jarrett Earnest, âJACK WHITTEN with Jarett Earnest,â in: The Brooklyn Rail, February 2017 (online))
Masterfully articulated, socially poignant, and conceptually astute, Alpha Group III witnesses the nascent moments of Jack Whitten harnessing the mind-shifting properties of paint and inserting himself into art history through his landmark Greek Alphabet paintings. The present workâs alluring quietude and exacting plasticity underscore an exceptionally nuanced grace that has come to define Whittenâs storied practice. Combings through the infinite possibilities of process and technique, the artist has cultivated an aesthetic language entirely of his own, a prescient and reverberating voice that slices through an unjust world with righteous anger: âMy environment is unnatural, unsensual, tough and uncompromising. Within this milieu I have decided to create my art. The painting is not the conduit. I am the conduit.â (the artist quoted in: Michelle Kuo, Helene Klevorn, Dana Liljegren, et al., âJack Whitten: Ten Things to Know About the Visionary Artist,â in: MoMA Magazine, 27 March 2025 (online))
