“The idea of beauty, the idea of making paintings be very loving in a really not loving time, that can be very political too. I think there are all kinds of ways of being political and you could choose what is the best that suits you… my work has been very political anyway – just who I am, what I do, what it reflects.”
—Stanley WhitneyHenri Matisse has served as a creative inspiration for Stanley Whitney, both regarding aesthetics and the relationship between art and times of turmoil. “Sometimes I think about the Picasso painting Guernica and then Matisse making beautiful paintings in Nice during the Nazi occupation—what’s more political?” The notion of Matisse painting his sensual work in Nice during World War II, with Nazis in the streets, is a scene which mirrors Whitney painting in the basement of the Kansas City Art Institute as a student in the mid-1960’s, the civil rights movement raging outside. In such creation, Whitney embraces the necessity of beauty amid times of unrest.
Drawing from Matisse’s visual vocabulary, Untitled, like many of Whitney’s monoprints, recalls the grid motif that reverberates throughout his oeuvre, channeling his admiration of Matisse’s organic line and vivid coloring. Here, Whitney also offers another parallel, to Matisse’s stained-glass windows at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in Southern France, a site to which the artist has made several visits; the hallmark panes of stacked color that comprise the present monoprint, combined with Whitney’s experimental interplay of opacity and transparency, from a unique work as luminous as a decorative chapel window.