Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul

This comprehensive monograph, authored by art historian Richard Shiff, offers a multifaceted and critical interpretation of Jack Whitten’s art-making and philosophy of life. Informed both by Whitten’s extensive writings and his personal conversations with the author, ‘Cosmic Soul’ offers a close reading of the artist’s outlook. Vividly illustrated and ranging freely through the course of the artist’s remarkable six-decade career, Shiff’s text illuminates the distinctive character of Whitten’s thought and the art it generated.

Born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1939, Jack Whitten is celebrated for his innovative processes of applying paint to the surface of his canvases and transfiguring their material terrains. Although Whitten initially aligned with the New York circle of abstract expressionists active in the 1960s, his work gradually distanced from the movement’s aesthetic philosophy and formal concerns, focusing more intensely on the experimental aspects of process and technique that came to define his practice.