A bit of apocrypha that’s floated around the art world for the past several years: when Artforum published one of Jack Whitten’s blazingly chromatic “slab” paintings on its cover in 2012, an eminent historian of modern and contemporary art allegedly wanted to know: Who is this second-rate Gerhard Richter? Like all gossip that sticks around, it struck a nerve on a number of levels. The scholar was Richter’s great champion, having made a career of theorizing him as a kind of “final” painter who went on painting long after the medium had been deemed historically unviable—i.e., dead. His identification of Whitten as Richter’s epigone was an embarrassing mistake, for Pink Psyche Queen had been created in 1973, seven years before the German artist began making his much-lauded squeegee paintings, which in photographs have a striking resemblance to Whitten’s slabs.
Thus a snide remark becomes a wry parable on the fallibility of art historians, at a moment when their authority appears to be at its lowest ebb. But it also makes the larger point that until very recently most people did not know Whitten’s paintings and had never even heard of him. This was all the more remarkable because he had lived and worked in New York since 1960, was known and respected by almost every abstract painter there, had taught in the city’s major art schools and shown in its galleries, had exhibited his slab paintings at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1974, and had had a ten-year survey at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1983.
Despite the apparent similarities between Whitten’s slabs and Richter’s squeegees, they represent independent solutions to the problem of how to paint after Abstract Expressionism and all it had come to symbolize during the cold war (which can hardly have meant the same thing to the two artists). My suspicion is that these bodies of work may actually have very little to do with each other. Whatever might be learned from the comparison, however, one thing is certain: Whitten’s slabs do not declare the exhaustion of painting or its historical stalemate but rather constitute a surging expansion of its possibilities.
The author
Jarrett Earnest’s monographs on the painters Sam McKinniss and Dana Schutz [start here... two, three] were both published this year. (July 2025)
