MoMA’s Luminous Jack Whitten Show Is the Museum’s Best Retrospective in Half a Decade

Back in the mid-1960s, Jack Whitten went looking for light in painting. He was hardly the first painter to do so, because if you were to boil down the entire history of painting in the West into a single premise, describing it as one long investigation into how best to represent light wouldn’t be all that ludicrous. But surely, there are few other painters across time who have come across illumination via music. And yet, that’s exactly what happened when he met the jazz musician John