Abstract painting moves in mysterious ways. Sometimes it leaps ahead and challenges us to keep up, as with Malevich’s black square of 1915, Jackson Pollock’s dripped skeins from the late 1940s, or Frank Stella’s shaped canvases and metallic stripes of the early ’60s. And sometimes abstract painting seems to stall, its devotees settling for cautiously repeating accepted conventions — monochrome, grids, stripes and so forth.
But certain artists stick with these conventions until they find themselves in them and show us something new. An example is Stanley Whitney, who, with a freehand geometry and a fierce and extensive range of color, found his way to a painting style all his own, one that neither stops history in its tracks nor repeats it, but has quietly and firmly expanded abstraction’s possibilities of both form and meaning...