Art, // January 23, 2018

Jack Whitten — ARTIST

President Barack Obama awards painter Jack Whitten the 2015 National Medal of Arts during a ceremony in the White House, Sept. 22, 2016, in Washington. (Carolyn Kaster/AP)

In an art world lately bent on rediscovering neglected artists — not all of them deserving — Whitten is the real thing, an artist whose intelligence and ambition seeped into everything he did. A restless innovator who worked in two and three dimensions, he fought to give physical materials a concentrated spiritual charge. He wanted to merge ghostly abstraction with concrete immediacy, the sensuous world with tremors of the vast unseen.

Jack Whitten. Artist studio, 36 Lispenard St., New York, 1983. (Peter Bellamy/Copyright Jack Whitten; Courtesy Hauser & Wirth)

— COVER PHOTO CREDIT