It’s remarkably difficult to find words for the flustering magnetism of the color abstractions by the painter Stanley Whitney, whose first solo museum show in the city, “Dance the Orange,” has just opened at the Studio Museum in Harlem. The works present wobbly grids of variously sized and proportioned blocks of full-strength color in friezelike arrays, separated by brushy horizontal bands. Whitney, sixty-eight, grew up outside Philadelphia. He has lived and worked mostly in Manhattan since 1968, with sojourns in Parma, Italy, where he and his wife of twenty-five years, the painter Marina Adams, have a second home. He belongs to a generation of resiliently individualist American painters—Mary Heilmann, Thomas Nozkowski, David Reed, and Jack Whitten come to mind—who have hewed to abstraction throughout periods of art-world favor for figurative and photography-based styles, if not of blanket disdain for the old-fangled medium of oil on canvas. Whitney has earned the passionate esteem of many fellow-painters and painting aficionados; now should be his moment for wider recognition. His recent work is his finest, and the case that it makes for abstract art’s not-yet-exhausted potencies, both aesthetic and philosophical, thrills...