One of the more intriguing features of the history of sculpture since Rodin is the recurring presence of posthumously discovered bodies of work which ultimately prove to be seminal, even revolutionary. Edgar Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years (ca. 1880) was the only three-dimensional work he showed during his lifetime, the ballerinas and horses being otherwise unknown. Honoré Daumier’s sculptures were personal creations, mainly created to help him with his drawn and painted caricatures and exhibited only the year before he died in 1879. Even Pablo Picasso’s activity as a sculptor only became fully understood in the years after his death. To this list we must now add Jack Whitten, currently the subject of a retrospective at the Met Breuer.¹ Of the nearly sixty works in the show, two-thirds are sculpture. And all will be new to visitors of the exhibition. That’s because, as the Met curator Kelly Baum writes in the catalog, “Even though he created sculptures for four decades, Whitten rarely shared them with the critics and curators who visited his studio. He similarly refused to sell or exhibit them, effectively cloaking them in a veil of secrecy—or rather, privacy.” Yet as with those earlier sculptors, this show places before us a singular and highly original talent whose work enlarged the possibilities of the art form in new and unexpected ways.

Whitten was born in 1939 in Bessemer, Alabama. (Sadly, he died in January of this year, just a few months before this