Revealing a Secret Art Life: A Painter’s Sculptures

Surprises abound in “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017,” a gorgeous, loquacious exhibition at the Met Breuer in Manhattan. The show’s title contains the first hint of the unexpected: the word “sculpture” following the name of an artist known — until now — as a painter.

Whitten was born in segregated Bessemer, Alabama, in 1939, and he said he always knew he wanted to paint. He settled in New York in 1960, studied at Cooper Union and had his first solo show at Manhattan’s Allan Stone Gallery in 1968. Soon he was part of a sprawling generation of abstract painters — Al Loving, Elizabeth Murray, Alan Shields, Brice Marden, Mary Heilmann, Howardena Pindell — who not only explored new materials and processes but also sought new ways to imbue seemingly pure, abstract form and the materiality of paint with narrative meaning.

But Whitten had a secret art life: Away from the pressures of the New York art world he made sculpture, not as a sideline, but as an essential part of his work. He was an expert carver, and many pieces were rooted in African tribal — and functional — objects. He went so far as to say his sculptures were the single greatest influence on his painting.

In the 1960s he made sculpture in upstate New York, including two robustly carved heads with shoe-polish glaze that were inspired by African-American face jugs — and resemble Old Testament prophets. After 1969 he shifted his activities an ocean away to Agia Galini, a small village on the Greek island of Crete, to which he and his family returned summer after summer. In both locations he had easy access to his main material — wood, which he used alone or combined with marble, stone and found materials, including bits of metal, fishing wire, fish and animal bones and, as time passed, electronic detritus.

In the year or so before he died, in January, at 78, Whitten decided it was time to go public with his sculpture, agreeing that the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Met would present this exhibition, organized by critic and independent curator Katy Siegel and Kelly Baum, a curator of postwar and contemporary art at the Met. Their project unveils 40 Whitten sculptures, almost his entire output in three-dimensions. Interspersed among them are 18 of his paintings from the last four decades, including his often astounding “Black Monolith” series — a group of 11 homages to important African-Americans that this show unites for the first time. Their shimmering mosaiclike surfaces are made from hundreds of small “tiles” fashioned from dried acrylic paint, a technique directly related to some of his sculptures. Furthering the show’s visual combustion are an ancient Minoan octopus vase and Mycenaean statuettes excavated on Crete and eight sculptures and masks from various African peoples.

The African objects cover a wide range in sensibility, from delicate burnished wood carvings of Yoruba Twin Figures to a rough-hewed Kongo people’s Nkisi (or male power figure) bristling with nails, blades and other sharp objects. Whitten made much of these opposing aesthetic approaches, often bringing them together in a single sculpture, like the metal-embedded, seemingly armored torso and bare white oak thighs of “John Lennon Altarpiece” of 1968 or the terse little sandwich of blonde cypress, metal and copper wire of “The Wedding,” from 2006.

This dynamic combination finds its earliest expression in the magnificent “Homage to Malcolm” from 1965, the year Malcolm X was assassinated. Something like a horizontal totem, it combines a block jammed with metal; a section of light raw wood; a darker carved one and finally a sleek black horn curving up into space. These four sections can be read as the stages of Malcolm X’s life, as petty criminal, prison inmate and Muslim convert, rising Nation of Islam star and finally as visionary leader, ruthlessly cut down.

Whitten’s additive processes achieve a new level of invention, and serenity, in “Lichnos” (2008), an homage to a fish that local fishermen found especially hard to catch. Another Greek connection: It evokes the “Winged Victory of Samothrace.” The cross-cultural, cross-media conversations resulting from the show’s disparate objects swirl around the visitor, conveying a vital sense of how artists thrive in an aesthetic space that is porous and fluid, distilling experiences and transforming sources. For Whitten, a black man from the South, these conversations are especially rich, plentiful and unavoidable, involving as they did the entwining of African-American, African and modernist cultures and histories.

The catalog’s chronology, which Whitten wrote, creates its own striking impression: of a motivated, curious and hardworking individual who seems to have been physically assured and dexterous. A photograph shows him around age 10 high in a spindly tree looking down at a treehouse he built on its branches.

Like many confident people he recounts his life as a series of epiphanies. Studying pre-med at the Tuskegee Institute he stood up in the middle of ROTC class, said, “What am I doing here?” and promptly transferred to Southern University in Baton Rouge so he could study art. He had a spiritual side, was guided by dreams and visions, and drawn to pieces of wood that he felt exuded mystical presences, like the tall upstate birch from which he carved the 10-foot-high “Ancestral Totem” of 1968, a subtly swaying stack of heads inspired by Northwest Indian art that culminates in a depiction of the artist as a llama. Before his first trip to Crete, he dreamed of a voice telling him to take his carving tools with him and sculpt a living tree into a totem, which he did. It still stands in the yard in Agia Galini, belonging to a family that became the Whittens’ lifelong friends.

At Southern University Whitten helped organize a civil rights protest that turned violent, which he later said changed him forever. Realizing that he might be killed if he stayed in the South, he took a Greyhound bus to New York, where his uncle was a policeman, and after his acceptance into Cooper Union he immersed himself in all the city had to offer, frequenting art bars and jazz clubs, meeting Romare Bearden, Norman Lewis and Jacob Lawrence. “I had a dialogue on what I called both sides of the divide” — black and white — he said in the documentary “Extended Play.”

He became fluent in painting and also the arts of Africa. These he had already studied in books but now saw in person for the first time, at the Met, the Brooklyn Museum and also in the famously packed gallery of his first dealer, Allan Stone, who was among the city’s most irrepressible collectors.

The installation at the Met Breuer is marvelously spacious and intermittently chronological, emphasizing Whitten’s development as a carver as well as the good luck he had in Crete, with its wealth of lustrous woods: black and white mulberry, wild cypress, butternut, olive and cherry, Serbian oak and Cretan walnut.

If Whitten occasionally took a wrong step, it was with marble; his use of big, highly finished white marble blades in later works pushes some toward kitsch. In “The Apollonian Sword” of 2014, a blade is supported by a chunk of charred black mulberry poured with molten lead that deserved to be left alone.

But the missteps barely detracts from the extraordinary journey in three dimensions through art, culture, time and personal experience laid forth here.

— Event info: “Odyssey: Jack Whitten Sculpture, 1963-2017” through Dec. 2 at the Met Breuer, Manhattan; 212-731-1675, metmuseum.org.