Artist, Jack Whitten: My wife, Mary, being of Greek background, she wants to go to Greece. So I said, “Well, damn right, let’s go. I’m interested.” I’ve always read Greek philosophy. Summer of 1969, we planned this trip.
Narrator: Later on, Whitten began studying the Greek language.
Jack Whitten: And the first thing, we were taught: the alphabet. And then, it occurred to me that I had been looking for something to attach myself to without having to deal with titles and storytelling. I did a painting for each letter in the Greek alphabet, sometimes two, three paintings.
All of that was a limited palette—just black and white. I eliminated all spectrum color. And I did that purposely. Red, yellow, blue, green—it carries a lot of psychological meaning, and I wanted to avoid that. To my surprise, I found that, in working with black and white, it expanded my sense of spectrum color. If you stand before those paintings and allow yourself to go into them, you can sense the spectrum. You would sense it in your brain.
Narrator: For Whitten, these abstract paintings contain what he calls “compression.”
Jack Whitten: I say to people, “Take everything you have ever felt, everything you have ever smelled, every sound you have ever heard, every sensation you have ever had that you have felt through your fingertips. Take all of that and compress it.” You would get an understanding of abstraction.
Archival audio courtesy of The HistoryMakers Digital Archive and The Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution