Stanley Whitney: Dance with Me Henri

Overview

Approximately 15 works on paper celebrate Stanley Whitney’s (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1946) lifelong engagement with Henri Matisse’s color, drawing, and composition and reveal his thinking through the stained-glass windows that are now a permanent feature of the BMA’s Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies.

These works connecting French modern art to other forms of making, including jazz, mid-century New York City painting, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Whitney had visited Matisse’s stained-glass windows at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in Southern France several times and his process of building stacks of color and playing with opacity and transparency was a natural fit for the form of the glass window, both its traditional aspects—the pane, leaded and blown glass—and its contemporary possibilities.

This exhibition is co-curated by Katy Siegel, former BMA Senior Research & Programming Curator and Thaw Chair of Modern Art at Stony Brook University, and Katy Rothkopf, The Anne and Ben Cone Memorial Director of The Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies and Senior Curator of European Painting and Sculpture at the BMA.

This exhibition is generously supported by an anonymous donor and AIG Private Client Group.