How does one derive and then develop and sustain a transcendent identity in abstraction? This is the overarching narrative in Richard Shiff’s monograph on one of the most inventive American abstractionists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in Jack Whitten: Cosmic Soul, published by the artist’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, in 2022.
Cora was a relentless and ambitious maverick. She was constantly reinventing her work. She wouldn’t settle, wouldn’t stop exploring abstraction. The paintings always seemed to lead her.