Jack Whitten’s Bookshelf
From W. E. B. Du Bois to Joseph Campbell to Virginia Woolf, explore favorite reads that shaped this groundbreaking artist.
Apr 22, 2025
The artist Jack Whitten was a prolific reader and thinker; his journals brimmed with references to books on far-ranging topics. Alongside making sculptures and catching octopuses in Crete, he spent his summers reading about such light subjects as quantum mechanics, metaphysics, and phenomenology, along with Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (a book his daughter borrowed). He also encouraged his students to read these titles as part of their professional development, as well as attending gallery and museum shows around the city, crafting applications for grants and graduate school, and honing artist “survival techniques,” topics he was well versed in from his own long career. After his passing in 2018, his studio remained untouched, with a stack of books still on the stove—travelogues by Patrick Leigh Fermor, essays by John Berger, and Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time. These texts, along with the below list of titles gathered and roughly ordered by Whitten, reflect the artist’s capacious appetite and the wide range of influences and forces—from history, philosophy, literature, and cultural movements—that shaped his groundbreaking art.
To learn and read more, be sure to also pick up the catalogue to MoMA’s current exhibition, Jack Whitten: The Messenger.
Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (Oxford University Press, 1917)
José Ortega Y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art (Princeton University Press, 1968)
Hans Hoffman, Search for the Real (MIT Press, 1967)
John Graham, System and Dialectics of Art (Johns Hopkins Press, 1971)
John Dewey, Art as Experience (Capricorn Books, 1934)
Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit (Vintage Books, 1984)
Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man (Beacon Press, 1964)
Joseph Campbell, Primitive Mythology (The Masks of God) (Penguin Books, 1991)
Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Vol. 4: Creative Mythology (Penguin Books, 1991)
Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion (Penguin Books, 1986)
Joseph Campbell, Oriental Mythology (The Masks of God) (Penguin Books, 1991)
Daisetz T. Suzuki, Zen and Japanese Culture (Bollingen Series LXIV) (Pantheon Books, 1959)
Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Yale University Press, 1971)
Lucy R. Lippard, Overlay (Pantheon Books, 1983)
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (McGraw-Hill, 1964)
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Fawcett Publications, 1964)
Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture (Beacon Press, 1965)
Harold Rosenberg, The Anxious Object (Mentor Books, 1969)
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (Harbinger Books, 1929)
Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Beacon Press, 1994)
Benoit B. Mandelbroit, The Fractal Geometry of Nature (W. H. Freeman & Co., 1982)
George Kubler, The Shape of Time (Yale University, 1962)
Claude Levi-Strauss, The Way of the Masks (University of Washington Press, 1982)
Stephen Skinner, Sacred Geometry (Sterling Publisher, 2006)
Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007)
A stack of Whitten’s books at his studio in Queens, New York, 2024