Stanley Whitney & Henri Matisse

Craig Starr Gallery is pleased to present Stanley Whitney Henri Matisse.

Organized in collaboration with Stanley Whitney and his studio, the exhibition brings together a selection of Whitney’s paintings and works on paper from his personal collection that have never been exhibited. These works will be shown alongside paintings and a cut-out by Matisse, including loans from the Museum of Modern Art, the Rita and Alex Hilman Foundation, and the Frances Lehman Loeb Center at Vassar College.

As John Elderfield writes in the exhibition catalogue, both artists used color not as decoration, but as pictorial structure. Matisse once said, “When one composes with color, like a musician with his harmonies, it is simply a question of emphasizing the contrasts.” Whitney echoes this approach when he describes his method as improvisational, each color both independent and relational.

“I start at the top and work down,” he has said. “That gets into call-and-response. One color calls forth another. Color dictates the structure, not the other way round.” Both artists imagine painting as a musical performance–a progression through an intuitive and cumulative logic of color.

Whitney and Matisse have been previously shown together in the 2022–23 exhibition Stanley Whitney: Dance with Me Henri at the Baltimore Museum of Art. For this show, Whitney unveiled a suite of stained-glass windows commissioned for Baltimore’s Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies, a project directly inspired by his visits to Matisse’s Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France. The show also included a collection of Whitney’s drawings and color plates from Matisse’s 1947 book, Jazz.

A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the exhibition and includes a new essay by John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; a consultant to Gagosian Gallery; and the inaugural Allen R. Adler, Class of 1967, Distinguished Curator and Lecturer at the Princeton University Art Museum, where he is preparing an exhibition on Willem de Kooning’s breakthrough years of the later 1940s.