Approximately 15 works on paper celebrate Stanley Whitney’s (b. Philadelphia, PA, 1946) lifelong engagement with Henri Matisse’s color, drawing, and composition and reveal his thinking through the stained-glass windows that are now a permanent feature of the BMA’s Ruth R. Marder Center for Matisse Studies.

These works connecting French modern art to other forms of making, including jazz, mid-century New York City painting, and the quilts of Gee’s Bend. Whitney had visited Matisse’s stained-glass windows at the Chapelle du Rosaire de Vence in Southern France several times and his process of building stacks of color and playing with opacity and transparency was a natural fit for the form of the glass window, both its traditional aspects—the pane, leaded and blown glass—and its contemporary possibilities.