He spent the summer of 1968 at Skidmore College, where he was befriended by his teacher Philip Guston. “I wanted to paint everything, and with abstraction, you’re not painting anything in particular, so that seemed possible,” he says. At art school in the midwest he started out making figurative work but soon realised he wasn’t a storyteller. He’s wearing a cobalt jacket and thick-rimmed rectangular glasses that remind me of his exuberant, chequered paintings. Whitney is friendly and open with a beguilingly rhythmic, slightly husky voice. ‘I didn’t fit in with any of them’ … Stanley Whitney, at his show at Gagosian, Grosvenor Hill, London. I mean, I probably would have if anyone had been interested.” Recognition has been a long time coming. “I am excited, but I’m trying to move forward rather than look through old work and wonder why I didn’t keep doing it. How does it feel to look back over his career? “Awful!” he replies, letting out another laugh, louder this time. Some works on paper have been on show at the Baltimore Museum of Art since last November, and he’s working towards a major retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, due next year. The 77-year-old Whitney is the greatest Black abstract artist in America, and his patchwork canvases composed of wobbly blocks of high-key colours are now in great demand. That’s Larry as in Larry Gagosian, titan of the art world, owner of the international chain of galleries. Whitney appears and says, “We’re staying in Larry’s apartment upstairs,” smiling as he hears the words out loud, then laughing at how inconceivable they sound. So, here I am at the gallery’s sleek outpost off the Champs-Élysées. The artist, Stanley Whitney, has an exhibition of new work opening this week at Gagosian in London and will be spending the next couple of months in Paris with his wife Marina Adams, who is also an artist. I ’m early, but the gallery receptionist tells me that Stanley will be right down.
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