Stanley Whitney Henri Matisse
Craig Starr Gallery
October 23, 2025\u2013March 14, 2026
New York<\/p>\n
As the unpunctuated title propounds, Craig Starr Gallery\u2019s\u00a0Stanley Whitney Henri Matisse pairs the titular artists in a broadly fluid hanging. In the show, there are seven oil on linen and two gouache on paper works by Whitney and three Matisses, two of which are oil on canvas still lifes and one of which is a version of the artist\u2019s 1949 cut-out, The Dancer (La danseuse). The lack of punctuational differentiation suggests that Whitney\u2019s work might cede to Matisse\u2019s, and vice versa. Indeed, there are some points of significant contiguity between the two artists\u2014chiefly, in their palettes. This is pronounced in the deliberately colorist pairings, like Whitney\u2019s Stay Song 26 (2018), whose central rectangle elements suspend a light azure and broken indigo block abutted by a charcoal-black demarcation, with Matisse\u2019s Gourds (Les coloquintes) (1915\u201316), in which the leftmost bulbous, glaucous gourd is flattened against an ink-black quadrilateral tile. However, as the exhibition progresses, we find Matisse\u2019s work increasingly dissolving the line as a marker of distinction while Whitney blazons it.<\/p>\n
In subject matter, too, there is a significant gulf between the two artists. In executing the latter work, Matisse was particularly interested in the transposition of surface forms against a contracted background plane, where the depicted objects would, to quote the artist, \u201cparticipate in the same intimacy,\u201d but without coming into contact. One espies a more attenuated formalism in Vase with Flowers and a Plate of Oysters (Vase de fleurs et le plat d’huitres) (1940). Whitney\u2019s gridded surfaces are also apportioned from one another, but the jointing line is an active part of the paintings that brings each seemingly separate chromatic unit into a shared visual semblance.<\/p>\n
Whitney is something of a formalist, but a moderate one at that. His rectilinear, blocked-out rows, arranged three or four cells long, were initially precipitated by an interest in producing chromatic and spatial harmonies that appeared to be in motion. This partially clarifies the mark-making that recurs throughout Whitney\u2019s work and his frequently lapsed edges and collapsed borders. It is not quite correct to deem Whitney a geometrical abstractionist; his quavering shapes teeter on the edges of structural loosening. The drips and drops leaking from the squares\u2019 bottom and top edges also intimate the presence of a brush-swept glide rather than any exacting, ideal shape. Thus, while the exhibition catalogue essay by John Elderfield adverts to Donald Judd\u2019s sculptures and Piet Mondrian\u2019s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942\u201343)\u2014noting that, like Whitney, the latter artist similarly drew upon hard bop jazz\u2019s syncopation\u2014Whitney\u2019s work is far less contained.<\/p>\n
There is, however, something to be said about the influence of music on Whitney. In analyses of how abstract paintings betray the influence of jazz music, the precise structural homology between a musical element and the work\u2019s painterly elements often remains underspecified. Where the transfiguration from sound to perceptual elements is stated, we are frequently provided with broadly abstract references to the relationship between improvisation and painterly \u201crhythm.\u201d Such analyses can traffic in unhelpfully opaque metaphors. Indeed, a pictorial figurative element or palette can just as easily bespeak a chord as it can a particular segment of the rhythm.<\/p>\n
This is not to claim that this line of analysis is mistaken. For instance, the title of Whitney\u2019s Stay Song 26 indicates the importance of musical influence and to forego this transfiguration would impoverish one\u2019s understanding of his practice. But what is it in the work\u2019s quilted patterning that conveys some facet of jazz music? Whitney\u2019s set of influences includes Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Ornette Coleman. Elderfield remarks that it was their more \u201cexperimental jazz\u201d compositions that served as \u201cWhitney\u2019s soundtrack.\u201d If, then, we briefly consider one of Davis\u2019s more avant-garde albums, like the 1970 Bitches Brew, we might propose that the isomorphism consists in his permutational looping and Whitney\u2019s askew cubic planes\u2014specifically, in their shared difference-in-repetition. Also recall Whitney\u2019s aforementioned bleeding horizontal lines, which range from saccharine orange to fleshy pink. These bounds separate his cells into rows, preventing us from interpreting Whitney\u2019s arrangements as columns. Here we find another point of confluence between Whitney\u2019s blocks\u2014which, however much they slope and slant, appear as sets of squares\u2014and (jazz) sheet music measures. The reference to the measure is most evident in Whitney\u2019s untitled gouache on paper (2019), where swatches of lime, coral, and tangerine are edged by the paper\u2019s white negative space. The measure, as aurally perceived in performed (jazz) music, can strike one as outstretched or distended, as evinced in Whitney\u2019s host of wending, dripping squares. The more pronounced the separation is, the more successfully his works express difference-in-repetition. The strongest of Whitney\u2019s paintings, Dream Keeper (2007), makes difference conspicuous by varying the height and width of his square cells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stanley Whitney Henri Matisse Craig Starr GalleryOctober 23, 2025\u2013March 14, 2026New York As the unpunctuated title propounds, Craig…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":160710,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[1149,3458,3457,3459,3456,2878,98,3461,3462,100,99,3455,17,1117,3465,749,2538,9,3463,24,63,3460,3464,905],"class_list":{"0":"post-160709","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-brooklyn","8":"tag-art","9":"tag-art-books","10":"tag-art-critic","11":"tag-art-reviews","12":"tag-artists","13":"tag-books","14":"tag-brooklyn","15":"tag-brooklyn-art","16":"tag-brooklyn-culture","17":"tag-brooklyn-headlines","18":"tag-brooklyn-news","19":"tag-contemporary-art","20":"tag-culture","21":"tag-dance","22":"tag-fiction","23":"tag-film","24":"tag-music","25":"tag-new-york","26":"tag-new-york-art-scene","27":"tag-new-york-city","28":"tag-nyc","29":"tag-phong-bui","30":"tag-poetry","31":"tag-theater"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=160709"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/160709\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/160710"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=160709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=160709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=160709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}