Jack Whitten, who died in 2018, at 78, had a long history with the Museum of Modern Art. MoMA was the first art museum he visited after his move, at the beginning of the 1960s, from segregated Alabama to New York City. And it was at MoMA that Whitten saw Paul Cézanne’s The Bather, which he identified as a “baptism”—despite the fact that he would reject figuration to become a master of abstraction. In 1968, Whitten’s painting For M.L.K. was part of a MoMA exhibition organized to honor Martin Luther King Jr., who’d been assassinated earlier that year. Now he comes full circle with the vast solo retrospective “Jack Whitten: The Messenger.” The title nods both to the breadth of Whitten’s vision and to his love of jazz, in particular the music of Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers. —Tobias Grey