Peace Be Still is a five-color lithograph of 2022. Two years later, Stanley Whitney’s fifty-year retrospective, How High the Moon, opened at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. The print carries the format he has used since the mid-1990s into lithography. Three rows of loosely brushed patches of color sit within a network of thick blue lines. The sheet is wider than it is tall, and in Whitney’s work that matters. His paintings are square and come in seven fixed sizes. He keeps the horizontal rectangle for works on paper, which he treats as a daily exercise and a place to try what the paintings do not allow.

The format took a long time to arrive. Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and came to New York in 1968 after art school in Kansas City. Through the 1970s and 1980s he painted bursts of color floating in open space, which he called “landscape air.” The change came after 1992, when he moved to Italy with his wife, the artist Marina Adams, and the two made trips to Egypt. The façades of the Colosseum and the Palazzo Farnese, stacked Etruscan funerary urns and the density of Egyptian building showed him that a surface could be packed with color and still breathe. “When I put the colors directly next to each other, I realized that I don’t lose the air,” he said. “I didn’t know at that point that the space was in the color.”

Whitney resists the obvious word for what followed: “I never think about the structure as a grid.” His models are looser than the grids of Minimalism. He points to the quilts of Gee’s Bend (“Nothing’s straight. Nothing’s regular. Everything’s a little crooked.”) and to the late paintings of Cézanne. He paints a canvas from the upper left, row by row, ending at the lower right, and each color answers the one before. Writers have compared this call and response to the jazz of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman. Whitney describes the result more bluntly: “There’s the grid, which should be very orderly, and then you put the color, and it throws the whole thing off.”

Lithography does not allow that sequence. Each of the five colors is printed separately, across the whole sheet at once. The order in which the image builds up is therefore set by the printing, not by one block answering the next. The patches keep the freehand, gestural marks of the paintings, but the improvisation now has to be planned in layers. The blue lines do the work that bands and bars do in the paintings, where Whitney decides how one color meets another. “Transitions are key,” he often says. Here they are printed in a single blue and joined into one network.

Whitney titles a work only when it is finished, and he has called titles “clues.” This one is scriptural. “Peace, be still” is what Jesus says to the storm in the Gospel of Mark. The words entered American church music through the refrain of a nineteenth-century hymn and James Cleveland’s gospel recording. Music supplies many of Whitney’s titles, among them Tango and Wild Thing, and his retrospective takes its name from the jazz standard “How High the Moon.” Read as a clue, the phrase fits his own account of his pictures, an orderly structure thrown off by color. The command to the storm describes what the blue network does to the color inside it.