Jack Whitten’s (1939-2018) processed-based abstractions have made him one of his generation's most innovative artists. Known for developing new tools and methods of paint handling that allow for creative ways of applying paint to canvas, Whitten’s technical advances impart an importance of materiality onto his work that underscores his compositions' spiritual elements. Barney’s Legacy II, painted in 1980, is one such example of Whitten’s ability to distill many influences into a single, mystical work of art.

The 1980s were a moment of essential shifts in Whitten’s practice. In the late 1970s, Whitten worked on his Greek Alphabet series, a grouping of works utterly devoid of color. It wasn’t until around the time Whitten painted Barney’s Legacy II that he began to reintroduce color into his painting slowly. Viewers can see Whitten's hesitation to completely open the canvas back up to pigment's possibilities in two ways: his strict use of primary colors in the spaces he does choose to embellish, and how many of these hues seems to be revealed from underneath the white ground as if slowly poking their heads above the surface. This renewed interest in color stemmed, in part, from his wife’s work at Nelson Whitehead, the largest importer of artist-grade papers. Whitten fell in love with the brightly colored Japanese papers they carried, and he began experimentally implementing them into his paintings or using them as jumping-off points. These geometric punctuations work in tandem with the lyrical swirls that surround them, recalling Whitten’s foundation in Abstract Expressionism, which formed during his early years in New York under the mentorship of Willem de Kooning and Norman Lewis. The freedom of movement and sense of improvisation elicited in the relationship between the blunt, accentuated forms and expressive strokes similarly evoke Whitten’s deep love and appreciation for jazz music.  

While Whitten is undeniably an abstractionist, one of the core tenants of his practice is the belief that formalism is merely a means to an end. Decidedly moving away from the Greenbergian philosophies that were still very much dominant upon Whitten’s arrival in New York in 1960, he saw abstraction as a vehicle to channel the essence of a life, an experience, or an idea, into a meditative and spiritual realm. For as much attention as Whitten paid to his surfaces' materiality, he gave just as much credence to the thoughts and feelings behind the forms. This interest in spiritual essence took on particular importance in the 1980s, the decade to which Barney’s Legacy II belongs. Uniting Whitten’s work from the period 1979 - 1989 is a process analogous to electronic imaging and photography. Inspired by the new scientific and technological advancements of the time, including cathode-ray scanning and electron microscopy, Whitten began to think of his painting as a transmission process, where the subjective qualities of a time, place, or person are distilled into a repeatable unit. This thought process furthered his tendency to dedicate works to specific notable figures, such as James Baldwin, Norman Lewis, or Martin Luther King Jr., an exercise particularly common during this decade. Although the identity is not definitively known, the title Barney’s Legacy II places this painting in a realm alongside Whitten’s “memorial” paintings and his Black Monolith series. With these factors coalescing in Barney’s Legacy II, this painting embodies the most crucial tenants of Whitten’s endlessly innovative practice.