The Innovation and Experimentation of Jack Whitten | Collection in Focus

Jack Whitten was one of the most innovative artists to emerge in the second half of the twentieth century. He was at the forefront of experimenting with new materials and techniques. The piece is from a particularly pivotal moment in Whitten’s career, when he begins to treat his studio as something like a laboratory. Whitten created a tool called a “develop” which scrape large amounts of acrylic across a canvas creating an almost instantaneous image, similar to a photograph. Whitten also invented pieces using what he called “painting as a collage”, where slabs of dried acrylic are applied to the canvas in a mosaic-like fashion.

In this video, Rachel Federman, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Drawings at the Morgan Library & Museum, takes a look at Whitten's "Dispersal 'A' #2," a work emblematic of the type of experimentation associated with the groundbreaking artist.