By Lauren Kaufmann

While he paints, Stanley Whitney listens to and is inspired by jazz. Miles Davis’s album Bitches Brew is his constant companion in the studio.

Stanley Whitney: How High the Moon at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, through September 1

Untitled, 1991. Stanley Whitney. Crayon on paper, 9 x 12 1/2 in. Photo: Robert McKeever

Stanley Whitney loves color. He fills his canvases with bright blocks of color, loosely arranged into a grid made up of four rows. The color patches are not always straight, and the horizontal bands separating the rows can be squiggly. Whitney occasionally leaves paint drippings, and sometimes he applies the paint unevenly. But the overall effect draws you in because the colors form a harmonious composition.

The title of the retrospective exhibition refers to a jazz standard sung by Ella Fitzgerald, among others. It’s an apt title. Whitney has devoted his life to making a personal form of artistic expression; he’s continually reaching for a higher plane. While he paints, Whitney listens to and is inspired by jazz. Miles Davis’s album Bitches Brew is his constant companion in the studio. The exhibit includes a QR code that leads you to a jazz playlist that reflects Whitney’s taste; there are tunes by Miles Davis, Nina Simone, Duke Ellington, Aretha Franklin, Herbie Hancock, Thelonious Monk, and Charlie Parker. This is a traveling exhibition organized by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. Before arriving at the ICA/Boston, the exhibit was on view at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Although Whitney has been a working artist for 50 years, he had his first solo exhibition just 10 years ago. The show offers a comprehensive look at Whitney’s evolution as an artist, with examples from every stage of his career. Judging by what’s on view, he has continually grown as an artist, despite the fact that public recognition came late in his career.

Endless Time, 2017. Stanley Whitney. Oil on canvas. Photo: Tom Loonan and Brenda Bieger

At “The Artist’s Voice,” a public program held at the ICA during the exhibition’s opening week, Whitney spoke of the “magic of color,” and he alluded to “color as freedom.” In response to a question from an audience member, the painter shared his thoughts on inspiration: “Making art is all about love. It’s putting a lot of love in the world. And the world needs a lot of love.” Whitney noted that he makes paintings for people to live with; he hopes that over time his work will have a positive impact on viewers’ sense of the world.

Describing how he arrived at his color block motif, Whitney said that he was influenced by the work of Morris Louis, an early 20th-century painter best known for staining his canvases with veils of color. As a major proponent of the “color field” school of painters, Louis produced large canvases filled with dramatic interplays of color. Whitney pointed out that his appreciation of Louis’s work made him stop painting like Titian, the Italian Renaissance painter known for his lifelike subjects.

The show’s thorough documentation of Whitney’s artistic journey includes a chronological display of his sketchbooks, dating back to 1987. There are drawings, etchings, prints, and small paintings. In a quotation on a wall text, Whitney acknowledges the critical importance of drawing. He has kept up a daily drawing habit throughout his career; he credits this practice with keeping him nimble as a painter.

In more recent works on paper, Whitney incorporates words into his art, as in the 2020 series entitled No to Prison Life, where he calls for reform of our criminal justice system. As a Black artist, Whitney has at times used his art to express his views on difficult societal issues.

Portrait of Stanley Whitney by Aundre Larrow, 2023. Photo: Aundre Larrow.

As he grew up outside of Philadelphia, Whitney listened to a lot of jazz at home. In high school, he spent time hanging out in New York jazz clubs. The artist didn’t grow up visiting museums, but when Whitney was in his early 20s he spent the summer at Skidmore College, where he took classes with painter Philip Guston. He credits Guston with teaching him how to compose a painting.

Following his summer at Skidmore, Whitney moved to New York City, where he struggled to find his way in the art world. During the ’70s, he attended Yale University, where he earned a master’s degree in Fine Art. In 1973, Whitney began commuting to Philadelphia to teach at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture. He continued to draw and paint, but his canvases did not reach a wide audience for many years. In 1992, Whitney and his wife, painter Marina Adams, had an opportunity to move to Rome, where he taught at Tyler’s Rome campus.

In the ’90s, Whitney began giving his paintings titles that reveal something about what he was reading, listening to, or thinking about. One of his paintings from this period is called Mingus, another is titled James Brown Sacrifices to Apollo, and a third is called My Tina Turner. This made it clear that Whitney’s work is inspired by jazz, suggesting that his paintings were comparable to musical improvisations — free aesthetic inventions within a defined framework.

His paintings from the ’90s also reflect the emergence of the grid motif, though their patches of color are unpredictably shaped — sometimes they are circular or oval. These paintings are multilayered; within one block, for example, there may be two or three colors coexisting cheek by jowl. The overall effect feels experimental and improvised.

While living in Rome, Whitney was struck by the architecture of the Colosseum and the Pantheon. The scale, geometry, and simplicity of these ancient edifices inspired an artistic breakthrough. After viewing the massive blocks of stone that make up these colossal buildings, Whitney conceived of his stacking system of color blocks.

Since 2002, Whitney has been creating paintings structured along four rows of color blocks. He begins each painting in the upper left-hand corner and then works his way across the canvas, eventually arriving at the next row. He says the first color suggests the second color, and the second color tells him what comes next. He advances in this intuitive fashion until the grid is complete.

No to Prison Life, 2020. Stanley Whitney, 2020. Watercolor and graphite on paper. Photo: Robert McKeever

In “The Artist’s Voice” at the ICA, Whitney mentioned that he’s an avid reader. He’s also well-versed in the history of art, imbuing his work with nuanced references to African textiles, American quilts, and artistic traditions ranging from Ancient Egypt and the Italian Renaissance to French Impressionism. In addition, Whitney was refreshingly honest about his self-doubt as an artist; he noted that artists are forced to always think about where they are in the world, that this is a solitary endeavor that inevitably stirs inner conflict and uncertainty.

What is certain is that this exhibition clearly and convincingly illustrates that Whitney has established his place in the art world. His paintings, the fruits of many years of struggle, shine brightly with the vibrancy, color, and rhythm of his improvisational imagination.

Lauren Kaufmann has worked in the museum field for the past 14 years and has curated a number of exhibitions. She served as guest curator for Moving Water: From Ancient Innovations to Modern Challenges, currently on view at the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum in Boston.