Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic For half a century, Jack Whitten tore through an art world that pretended not to see him at all. Persistently original, restlessly evolving, and uncharmed by fashion, he made it difficult for even his champions to grasp the scope of his career. In 2018, the year he died at 78, the Met presented an astonishing selection of sculptures he made during summers in Crete and kept for his own pleasure. A few years later, Dia Beacon homed in on a shimmering and enigmatic series from the 1970s, The Greek Alphabet Paintings. Now it turns out that those were just keyhole glimpses into a complex panoramic career.MoMA’s gorgeously installed retrospective parades across the entire sixth floor, putting those details and detours in context. Comprehensive and exhilarating, the show presents an artist who balanced the celebratory and the saturnine. He was surely referring to himself as well as his palette when he said (in 1989), “Black pigment is so symbolic for me . . . everything is there, all the spectrum. More than any other colour, black has compression, tension, weight; it’s like a magnet, it sucks the light in.”Born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, he grew up amid the terror and injustice of Jim Crow, as well as the battles against it. “I witnessed evil,” he said after a march in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. “I saw hatred coming out of white people. They attacked us, threw shit and piss on us. We made it all the way to the state capitol building as they were hitting us with sticks. I did it then, but I made a vow, I would never put myself in that position again. That march is what drove me out of the South. I took a Greyhound bus to New York City.” The year was 1960.Whitten recoiled from pure political art, obscuring the message and mediating violence through a darkling scrimTraumatised and uprooted, he struggled to come to terms with the racial violence he had fled. The first works he produced in his new home seemed haunted. Ghostly, floating shapes — a screaming head? a skull? — emerge out of blackness. That period culminated in “Birmingham 1964”, a work Whitten accurately described as a “wound”. Through a hole gouged out of charred foil, a news photo appears like a distant memory, veiled in nylon mesh. You might recognise the picture from an anti-segregation demonstration in May 1963: a police dog grips a young Black man’s cardigan in its maw, while a fellow marcher yanks at his sleeve, hoping to pull him back to safety.Whitten tossed aside abstraction, which was too weak to express his rage. Still, he recoiled from pure political art, obscuring the message and mediating violence through a darkling scrim. History had no such qualms: four months after the march, the KKK bombed Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. His painting serves as a requiem for the four young girls who were killed that day.He changed course after that, hiding faces or landscapes beneath a profusion of lively brushstrokes. In “Martin Luther King’s Garden” (1968), painted just after the assassination, the dead leader’s features lurk almost invisibly within a lush and radiant tangle of colour. The vibrant pastoral composition dwells not on King’s death but on his promise, a future of freedom and light.Once again, Whitten felt the need to escape America’s grim turmoil, and this time he got out of the country altogether, heading to the family homeland of his new bride, Mary Staikos. Their wanderings through Greece took them to the village of Agia Galini, on Crete’s south coast, and there he found a measure of serenity. One of the show’s thrilling surprises is a quasi-abstract landscape looking down through leggy pines towards the electric blue sea. Entranced by the perfumed air, vegetal abundance, and what Whitten saw as the fusion of European and African cultures, the couple returned to Crete every summer.During the months spent back in his New York studio, though, he advanced with more deliberation than ebullience. He placed canvases on the floor, sloshing them with acrylic paint, then dragged a great wooden rake over the surface to uncover the buried hues. Those abstractions from the early 1970s, some textured with an Afro comb, have a deep, layered glow, as if subconscious thoughts were bubbling up then sinking back down in a constant pattern of convection.Gradually, the work grew busier, sharper, and more brooding. To make “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” (1974), Whitten placed objects that he called “disrupters” beneath the canvas: chunks of cardboard, a wire coat hanger, assorted debris. Then came the buckets of paint in a pre-determined order, after which he pulled his rake — “developer” was his term — across the whole concoction. The result, meticulously planned yet ultimately unpredictable, yielded effects of movement and stoppage, like the blur of a figure streaking before a camera’s lens.Uniting preparation and chance, Whitten reached back to 1930s surrealism and the example of Max Ernst, who found coherent compositions in rubbings of floorboards or skeins of rope. There were other models, too. A text panel suggests that, in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”, Whitten was invoking Miles Davis’s elastic improvisation, in which a loose melodic canopy fluttered over a rigid harmonic structure. He cited a different source: the Goethe poem about the broom that goes berserk, overwhelming its creator like a pre-digital form of artificial intelligence.Whitten had always been drawn to the act of relinquishing control. As a student, he complained to Willem de Kooning that a teacher had reprimanded him for getting bogged down in “accidents”. Standing on a Greenwich Village street corner, de Kooning reacted with a cry that became Whitten’s credo: “You tell that motherfucker that there is no such thing as accidents in painting!”And yet there was never anything casual about Whitten’s work; he was a master at managing randomness. In the late ’70s, he pared his palette down to black and white in the minimal and sublime Greek Alphabet series. Later, he began drying and dicing acrylic paint and assembling the resulting tesserae into intricate mosaics. In his Black Monolith series of abstract portraits of major cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison and Jacob Lawrence, Whitten returned to the ghostly dreams of his first years in New York. At MoMA, these tributes glitter darkly, like nocturnal landscapes where spirits coalesce into terrifying form before peaceably dissolving into the ether. To August 2, moma.org
