7.21.25 — Visible Man
How do you paint an invisible man? When Jack Whitten paints his homage to Ralph Ellison, it is his Black Monolith, and his imagined portrait is black and nearly five feet tall. It is black enough to create a mask that not even Whitten can penetrate, which is saying a lot.
Of course, he would not be up to the challenge without Invisible Man, among the most haunting works of American fiction. Ellison’s invisible man is very much alive every time someone looks between its covers. Nor is it merely a pathology in the mind of black man in a basement with too much to say. It is a reality, it asserts, that a black man can never escape as long as white America chooses to look the other way. Unless, that is, white America chooses to look and sees only its fears. Unless, too, a creative artist stakes out his own presence in sixty years of work, at MoMA through August 2—and it is the subject of a longer and fuller review, in my latest upload. 
That inviting and imposing face stares out from the entrance to Whitten’s retrospective, and he throws everything he can at it, including molasses, copper, salt, chocolate, and rust. The work contains broken eggshells, too, consistent with its broken tiles and mirrors, for a wide-open white background to a colorful work of art. If it is a rough assemblage, he is not hiding the damage. And if its materials are sticky, he was already well into his career in 1994, and he planned on being around a long time. He could return for inspiration to enough black and white Americans to keep you on your toes the whole way. He could also plan on being first and foremost an abstract painter.
For Whitten, persistence gave him the power to look back at both painting and America. He rang the changes on black abstraction, along with such artists as Sam Gilliam and Melvin Edwards. He lived through the fall of the Twin Towers and paid tribute to that, too. He took art into the digital era, with toner for his black. He was only, as the show’s title has it, “The Messenger,” but with a message he insists others hear. He kept starting over until others got the message, too, and so did he.
He made it easy. He worked in familiar genres, including spatters and stripes. He made his studio below Canal Street, where he could see Ground Zero and share the memories with anyone. At the same time, he made building a career anything but easy and invisibility almost inevitable. He abandoned figurative paintings and his homage to African Americans just when abstract art was giving way to critical thinking, conceptual art, and diversity. He kept changing just when a growing market for art demanded a signature that sells.
Invisible Man is tormented and angry, and Whitten is neither. There was always too much new to learn and to see. He was working class through and through, the son of a coal miner and seamstress in Alabama. Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, shares its very name with a process for making steel, but his parents were determined that he be the family’s first to attend college. He went as a premed, but dropped out to make art. Imagine him at just twenty in 1960, arriving in New York.
He found friends easily, from Willem de Kooning to Romare Bearden and from Abstract Expressionism to African American art. He had already thrown himself into the civil-rights movement. He could be an activist by day, a museum-goer on weekends, and a regular in Brooklyn jazz clubs by night. His brother was a jazz musician himself. His mentors taught him, as Edwards said, that painting was a form of improvisation but in forms inherited from the past. He and his wife summered in Greece and Crete where art and myth go back a very long way.
He dedicated much of his early work to his influences, which to him meant people. Other drivers were light and color, and they pushed him away from narrative painting. After a start with a loose haze, he used successive layers to blur the boundaries between horizontal stripes and to create a greater radiance. He favored orange and other departures from red, yellow, and blue to insist on the light. Materials were the greatest driver of all, and horizontal incisions run the entire width of a painting, leaving the stripes in low relief. He could make the cuts with a rake or a comb.
Whitten liked acrylic because he could layer it—and because he could make it dry slowly or fast. He could apply it to plastic sheets that could become the painted surface, even after he peeled them away, much like Beatriz Milhazes in Brazil. They become that much more visible when he abandons stripes for splashes of acrylic, for at once the free layered geometry of color-field painting and an underlying single color to the entire canvas. Much the same materials drew him to abandon color for black and white. He served as artist in residence at Xerox, where he experimented with toner. One can think of his entire career as an ongoing experiment, and I continue this review next time with why he kept changing.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.