Since he’d first arrived in New York, [Jack] Whitten had haunted the city’s nightclubs in pursuit of jazz, which Mary [Staikos] recalled as “the background music” of their lives. He heard Thelonious Monk, Ornette Coleman, and Miles Davis at the old Five Spot and was friends with Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, and Pharoah Sanders, among other musicians. Whitten had sold his own tenor sax by 1963, deciding instead to embody in visual form his understanding of jazz’s musical structure—one of high-driving abstraction that opens into almost unfathomable freedom. One moment that reverberated for him for decades was a conversation with John Coltrane, who described his compositions as a “wave.” Whitten translated these “sheets of sound” into Light Sheet I (1969), a large unstretched canvas in which enormous silk-screened gestures create diaphanous veils of yellow, pink, purple, and gray over nested squares.

At that time New York’s reigning god of painting, Willem de Kooning, in his sixties and at the height of his power, was producing a body of work that combined muscular action and aching sensitivity in agile yellows, pinks, grays, and blues. Without seeming to refer to anything but paint itself, he could conjure the transitory effects of the landscape, of sunlight on water or sand, of living bodies and sensate flesh, or the palette and contours of Raphael or Titian—not just the look but the feel of them—effects that adamantly remained just paint on a flat ground. Regardless of the labor involved, de Kooning wanted these works to appear effortlessly fast, like “a wind blowing across the surface.” They remain to this day the highest achievement in gestural abstract painting.

Jarrett Earnest, “‘I Am the Heir to Delacroix’”