Stanley Whitney valuation
Has painted the same loose grid of stacked colour blocks since the 1990s, and made it carry everything.
Stanley Whitney was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1946, studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, graduating in 1968, and took his MFA at the Yale School of Art.
What a work by Stanley Whitney is worth
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Bio
Stanley Whitney was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, in 1946, studied at the Kansas City Art Institute, graduating in 1968, and took his MFA at the Yale School of Art. For many years he taught, at Temple University's Tyler School of Art among other places, while his painting moved slowly from figuration towards colour. The breakthrough came while he was working in Italy in the 1990s. Since then his paintings have been grids of roughly square blocks of colour, painted freehand and separated by horizontal bands, with each colour chosen in answer to the ones around it, in a rhythm he often compares to jazz. The Studio Museum in Harlem gave him Dance the Orange in 2015 and the Baltimore Museum of Art Dance with Me Henri in 2022, and How High the Moon, a retrospective organised by the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2024, travelled to the Walker Art Center and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston.
The large paintings are oil on linen and unique; he also makes many smaller canvases, gouaches and coloured-pencil drawings on paper on the same grid, and prints. Provenance through his galleries — Galerie Nordenhake since 2012 and Gagosian since 2022, and earlier Lisson, Matthew Marks and Team among others — and the date of the work are what a buyer checks first. The paint sits thinly, with drips and loose edges, which belong to the work and should not be mistaken for damage.
Kansas City, Yale and How High the Moon
During the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022 the Buffalo AKG showed his Italian Paintings at Palazzo Tiepolo Passi, and his work had been in the Biennale itself in 2003.
He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996 and the inaugural Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in 2011, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017.
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