Frank Stella: A Retrospective (excerpt)

Auping

Frank Stella A Retrospective

Frank Stella A Retrospective

Frank Stella A Retrospective

Frank Stella A Retrospective Michael Auping With essays by Jordan Kantor and Adam D. Weinberg, and an interview with Frank Stella by Laura Owens

Yale University Press, New Haven and London in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth

Frank Stella: A Retrospective is jointly organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

In New York, the exhibition is sponsored by

In Fort Worth, generous support is provided by the Kleinheinz Family Endowment for the Arts and Education; the Henry Luce Foundation; Mark Giambrone, Dallas; Audrey and David Mirvish; the National Endowment for the Arts; Neiman Marcus, Youth Education Sponsor; and the Eugene McDermott Foundation.

Copyright © 2015 by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Board of Trustees, Fort Worth Art Association.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition Frank Stella: A Retrospective, organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas.

Artwork by Frank Stella © Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

Significant support is provided in part by

Major support is provided by Marianne Boesky Gallery; The Brown Foundation, Inc.; Julia W. Dayton; the Daniel and Pamella DeVos Foundation; Katherine Farley and Jerry Speyer; the Fisher Family; The Marc Haas Foundation, Inc.; Dominique Lévy Gallery; the Henry Luce Foundation; Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker; the National Committee of the Whitney Museum of American Art; and an anonymous donor.

Generous support is provided by Theodor and Isabella Dalenson, Ann and Graham Gund, Marguerite Steed Hoffman, Martin Z. Margulies, Kenneth & Marabeth Tyler, Melissa Vail and Norman Selby, and the Bagley and Virginia Wright Foundation.

Additional support is provided by Audrey and David Mirvish and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Significant endowment support is also provided by Sueyun and Gene Locks, and the Jon and Mary Shirley Foundation.

Frank Stella: A Retrospective is organized by Michael Auping, Chief Curator, Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, in association with Adam D. Weinberg, Alice Pratt Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and with the assistance of Carrie Springer, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York October 30, 2015–March 7, 2016 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas April 17–September 4, 2016 de Young, San Francisco November 5, 2016–February 26, 2017

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers.

Published by Yale University Press 302 Temple Street P.O. Box 209040 New Haven, CT 06520 yalebooks.com/art in association with the Whitney Museum of American Art 99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 whitney.org and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth 3200 Darnell Street Fort Worth, TX 76107 themodern.org Designed by Kobi Benezri Set in Lettera-Txt and Cus type by Kobi Benezri Printed in Italy by Graphicom Library of Congress Control Number: 2015936358 ISBN 978-0-300-21544-1 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The paper in this book meets the requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

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Contents

vii Foreword

Marla Price and Adam D. Weinberg x Acknowledgments

Michael Auping 1

The End Depends Upon the Beginning Adam D. Weinberg

15 The Phenomenology of Frank:

“Materiality and Gesture Make Space”

Michael Auping 41 Frank Painting:

Some Aspects of Stella’s Work

Jordan Kantor 53 Plates 153 The Pratt Lecture

Frank Stella 155 Laura Owens in Conversation with Frank Stella 159 Chronology with Selected Bibliography and Exhibitions

Leslie Murrell 227 Exhibition Checklist 233 Index

238 Photo Credits

The Phenomenology of Frank ∕ “Materiality and Gesture Make Space”

Michael Auping

Frank Stella’s current studio is immense, an enclosed acre of space. It is jammed with work—a jungle of twisted metal, plastic, and canvas, all a hybrid of handpainted, computer-generated, and machine-made elements. Some of these interconnected gestures appear to be flying apart, others pressed into a vertiginous density. At times, different conglomerations are placed so close together it can be hard to tell where one work ends and another begins. These recent works would appear to be a long way, aesthetically, from the artist’s days as a pioneering Minimalist, most surely from the geometric severity of his now-famous Black Paintings that many of us cut our teeth on, and that gave us a view of what abstraction could look and feel like after Abstract Expressionism. But, in fact, these works are fundamentally not that far from Stella’s earliest visions of abstract painting, when he was a student negotiating the physical and complex spatial dynamics of a picture plane.

An untitled painting from 1957 that Stella produced as a student at Princeton depicts a vague, brownish plane that could be a floor or a tabletop (fig. 1). Hovering in a space just above it are thickly painted gestures, possibly made with a palette knife (the tool Stella initially learned to paint with), fighting for position as they revolve around the “table.” The long, black markings are undoubtedly a nod to Franz Kline, whose work Stella admired along with that of numerous other Abstract Expressionists of a previous generation.

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However, unlike the angularity and graphic flatness of Kline’s abstractions, Stella’s lines are subtly bowed, suggesting an interior space around which the cagelike strokes are turning. Within the muscular gesture and swelling space of this early painting lies the DNA that would propel Stella’s development over the next five decades.

Recalling this early painting, Stella has said, “At the time, I think I might have thought of it as a still life, an abstract still life, but that wasn’t the relevant thing. The important thing was the space the marks suggested. It was a space within a space. The painting was physical, but it also had a pictorial dimension. . . . Materiality and gesture make space. It creates the context.”1 This would not be the last time the artist would unexpectedly relate abstraction to traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, and even portraiture. He would name his abstractions after cities and people, perhaps more to connect them to the pictorial history of painting than to the subjects themselves. More importantly, the concept of a space within a space, often taking the form of a circular or concentric motion, would be a central theme running through his works over the following decades, as would his increasingly methodical investigation into the complexities of how we interpret a painted illusion that is also a painted object.

In a lecture not long after making Untitled (1957), Stella spoke of how learning to paint is a matter of

Fig. 1 Frank Stella, Untitled, 1957. Oil on paper, 40 × 26 in. (101.5 × 66 cm).

Princeton University Art Museum, N.J.; gift of Richard M. Ludwig x1991-72 Fig. 2 Hollis Frampton, #3 (28 painting Getty Tomb), from The Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958–62. Gelatin silver print, 9 1/2 × 7 1/2 in. (24 × 18.9 cm).

Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; gift of Marion Faller, Addison Art Drive 1990.34.3

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looking at and imitating other painters and paintings.2 However, he also discovered that learning how to imitate expressionism was not that easy—nor, at a certain point, even that interesting. The problem with intuitive gestural painting is that, to a considerable extent, one has to be “lucky” for the gestures to come together in a unified composition. (A previous generation of Abstract Expressionists who had absorbed Surrealism’s interest in the creative unconscious could interpret this process of painting or drawing with the wrist as an autographic expression of a creative, emotional well.)

Yet Stella was less interested in arbitrary luck than in analytics. As he later remembered, “You often overpainted or overexpressed your way into a bad painting.”

In 1958, Stella saw Jasper Johns’s exhibition of flag paintings at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. The stripes in Johns’s flags did not float arbitrarily on their ground, but filled it from edge to edge. The image was organized in complete accordance with its ground support. “Learning how to make abstract paintings,” Stella has said, “is just about learning how to paint, literally learning what paint and canvas do. Paint and canvas are not spiritual.” For Stella, as with Johns, logic trumped emotion.

Those who know Stella have experienced his often blunt and incisive way of taking lofty ideas about abstraction and bringing them down to earth. His early biography shaped an artist who would possess blue-­ collar directness and educated nuance. While personal-

ity is not often a productive entry into an artist’s work, Stella’s matter-of-factness is indicative of his approach to abstract painting. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, a small town northeast of Boston populated by workingclass families and middle-class professionals, Stella grew up with street smarts and high family aspirations.

His mother was an amateur artist, his father an obstetrician. Stella attended the prestigious Phillips Academy prep school and later graduated from Princeton. His father worked sixty-hour weeks, insisting that his son learn not only how to study, but also how to work with his hands.3 Stella’s first real experience with painting was painting houses and boats, generally on his father’s orders.

After seeing the Johns exhibition in 1958, Stella began using stripes as a compositional unifier in a number of paintings from that year. Rather than including a section of stars, as in Johns’s flag compositions, Stella painted a dark square or rectangle near the center of the work. Inspired by Robert Motherwell’s Spanish Prison Window paintings, Stella gave the impression of punching a compartment of space through the painting, suggesting that the piece had a thick, deep inner core. Over the next decade, he would gradually close this space off, using only stripes as his image. Later, however, he would physically build up his Aluminum and Copper Paintings of the early 1960s in an almost architectural manner and punch a literal hole through them.

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At the time he was making his Black Paintings (1958–60), Stella was still painting houses to help pay the rent, and he was actually using a house painter’s brush and enamel house paint to make those works.

Hollis Frampton’s tongue-in-cheek photographic essay The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958–62), a parody of behind-the-scenes photographic portraits of artists in their studios and their daily lives (particularly Pablo Picasso), announced a new kind of artist—one less romantic and bohemian, and more self-mocking and postmodern (fig. 2). The photographs showing Stella in the process of creating one of his Black Paintings manifested a new attitude toward the sacred act of painting. He approached the canvas the way he would paint a house, as a form of geography to be mapped out and covered, mimicking the edges of the canvas and continuing to paint the lines concentrically until he ran out of blank space. Even today, these photographs have an air of humorous pedestrianism, almost Beckettian in the monotony they suggest. The photographs are in stark contrast to Hans Namuth’s iconic photographs of Jackson Pollock moving almost ritualistically over his stage-like, floor-bound canvases. While these photos of Stella and Pollock painting clearly acknowledge different generational attitudes, they are also an exaggeration: Pollock was far more controlled than he appears in Namuth’s representations, Stella more nuanced.

Many who have only seen the Black Paintings illustrated in books think of them as conceptual statements of repeatable lines. They have often been portrayed as a rebuke to the sometimes overplayed metaphysics of Abstract Expressionism. In fact, they are a shrewd synthesis of much of the Abstract Expressionist art Stella had admired as a student at Princeton, visiting New York galleries and museums. Stella was, and remains, an astute student of art history, particularly the history of abstract painting, and virtually all of his work can be seen as a response to that history. The Black Paintings absorbed the all-over compositions of Pollock’s classic Abstract Expressionist drip paintings and, in particular, the graphic directness of his late monochrome black paintings (also made with black enamel paint). They can be interpreted as a dark meditation on Barnett Newman’s vertical stripe, or “zip,” in which a linear gesture is tactile, but positioned against a smoother ground to create a kind of frontal assault on the viewer.

The complexity of these paintings consists in the fact that, while their materiality creates a forward push toward the viewer, a somber, atmospheric quality is also a part of the experience. Stella’s stripes are continually

17 Phenomenology of Frank

described as sucking the space out of the image, and characterized as strictly flat paintings that follow the influential critic Clement Greenberg’s dictum that an abstract painting should read as a flat, material image, a visually inert plane, lacking depth or atmosphere. In fact, they are anything but inert. Stella learned from Pollock, Newman, and, in the case of the Black Paintings in particular, Mark Rothko, that materiality does not preclude the possibility of creating space. Both the concentric, linear patterns that Stella used for the compositions and the way he painted them inspire competing perceptions regarding materiality and depth. On the other hand, the Black Paintings draw attention to the edges of the painting, either by following an edge or running stripes into it, thus giving the paintings a forceful, object-like quality. These compositions, combined with the artist’s physical painting technique, create spatial conundrums. Their concentric stripes draw the eye into the image, while the enamel paint pulls us back to the surface and out from the wall due to their thickness. Although Stella’s designs are illusionistic, his paint surface is assertive. In making his stripes, Stella initially loaded his brush with enough paint to fill the weave of the canvas, and then he went over the same area a number of times, “to give it a good, thick coat.” The paintings exploit the fact that enamel paint is oil-based and dries to a hard, semiglossy finish.

This glossiness, bordered by thin channels of raw canvas, slightly deflects light, creating an indeterminate surface. So, at times, the stripes appear to be anchored to the canvas, while at others they seem to hover just in front of it.

Space in the Black Paintings is also suggested by the fact that the stripes are not as geometrically stable as they might initially appear. Although the works are frequently described as “pinstripe” paintings, implying precision and regularity, Stella has often reminded people that his lines are, in fact, not that straight.

Because he was painting on a relatively pliable stretched canvas rather than a hard surface like the side of a house, the ground plane would bow slightly, creating lines that are subtly curved. Stella found these subtle deviations from strict geometry interesting.

Indeed, the result is the illusion of a gentle vibration, like strings on an instrument that have been plucked.

Also, since no masking tape was used, the edges of the lines have a slightly feathered quality, suggesting a visual buzz between the bands.

At the end of the day, the Black Paintings are as much Rothko as Johns in their moody and ambiguous spatial depth. This effect is even more obvious in a

number of the pre–Black Paintings, such as Yugatan and Delta, both from 1958, where purple or reddish underpainting shows through between the stripes, creating a slightly hidden color space (plates 4–5).

While Stella would never make proclamations about the emotionality of his paintings, as Rothko did, the most surprising aspect of the Black Paintings—given the seemingly flat-footed process that created them—is the inexplicable emotional effect of their dark, vibrating space. Stella’s emotional existentialism would in fact be more desolate than Rothko’s, and in some cases would be amplified by provocative German titles related to National Socialism and the Nazi party, in particular Arbeit Macht Frei (1958) and Die Fahne hoch! (1959; plate 11). This could be a form of dark humor referring to Stella’s early admiration for Johns’s flag paintings, or more obliquely to the fact that the Nazi swastika is an abstract, deductive design that has a powerful visual force. In regard to such titles, Stella has said simply, “The Black Paintings were dark, very dark. Some of them needed dark titles.” Other titles have more direct connections. The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II of 1959, for example, compares Stella’s methodical intentions to the dark and bleak conditions of his first studio in New York (plate 9). The title also suggests the dialectical character of Stella’s future development, which would balance between organization and near compositional anarchy.

Much has been written about the Black Paintings and their effect on subsequent abstract painting in America.4 Their blunt but somehow sensual forcefulness pushed abstract painting into a new era of materialism.

For Stella, they laid the foundation for a career-long exploration of the relationship between materiality, illusionistic space, and literal space. They, along with his next three series of paintings—the Aluminum, Copper, and Purple Paintings—would provide a critical bridge between Abstract Expressionism and the first generation of Minimalists.

Pictorial Objects While still working on the Black Paintings, Stella was producing drawings for future works. These drawings have more complex linear patterns involving long lines that suddenly make an abrupt right angle jog—“sort of like the design for an electric circuit,” as Stella has described it. However, these preparatory drawings of jogged lines presented a problem for subsequent paintings. If Stella transferred the notched geometric

drawing to a square or rectangular canvas, the image would simply sit on its surface, creating a dissonance between the painted lines and the contextual shape of the canvas. He expressed his concern to fellow painter and Princeton classmate Walter Darby Bannard, who suggested that Stella remove parts of the canvas that seemed superfluous to the geometric composition. In other words, shape the canvas to the image. Stella did just that, the result being his Aluminum Paintings of 1960, named after the metallic paint he used to make them. With the goal of visually activating the surface image, the shaped canvas became an even more forceful partner to that image.

The Abstract Expressionists essentially denied the existence of the edges of the canvas by creating gestures that were made inside the painting’s borders or appear to fly off the canvas, as if the boundaries were not there, as in Kline’s edge-crashing brushstrokes. (The one possible exception to this was Newman, who placed his zips as a reference to the framing edge of his paintings.)

Stella’s approach was to emphasize the edges, transforming the modernist square and rectangle as neutral background into more forceful, abstract, pictorial objects. Because the canvas shape was now more complex, he used thicker stretchers (three or more inches thick), butting and nailing heavy pieces of wood together for stability. The resulting works were abstract “pictures” that aggressively pushed forward from the wall.

Stella’s attraction to the physicality of painting was partly the result of a nervous system that needed not just to paint, but to build. Bannard remembers, “Frank was an engineer. He liked building things. Although he complained about it, I think he liked building stretchers as much as the painting part of the process.”5 Everything about Stella’s art is physical—a process of building things up, tearing them down, and reworking them. This process was even applied to his prints (an immense oeuvre in itself ), which he makes, tears apart, and rebuilds into ever more physical printed objects.

The overt physicality of Stella’s paintings had the effect of changing the way we look at and define painted canvases. They were no longer only a pictorial illusion, or, as Greenberg would have it, simply a flat plane, but a more complicated construction incorporating different types of illusion, combined with disconcerting shapes.

The Aluminum Paintings, and the subsequent series of Copper Paintings, were seminal in the development of a broader investigation of nontraditional canvases. Lawrence Alloway, who organized the 1964 exhibition The Shaped Canvas at the Guggenheim

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Museum, heralded Stella as a key innovator of the “shaped canvas.” While shaped paintings have ­undeniably been around for centuries in churches, here the form was being applied to abstraction, with implications that could change the nature of abstract space in the confines of architecture. Alloway later reflected, “A number of artists in the show saw shape as style, a new way to make an abstract image. Stella understood shape in the larger context of architecture, that shapes were just units in a systemic process of building material to engage space by incrementally filling it or enclosing it.”6 For Alloway, Stella united the innovation of abstract, shaped canvases with another new development—systemic painting—highlighted in an exhibition of that name that Alloway presented at the Guggenheim two years later. In systemic painting, the goal is not to make one dramatic or signature shape, but, rather, a series of simple, seemingly interchangeable units that are part of an ongoing process of building.

Stella felt that the term “shape” was stylish in its own way, and, around this time, organized his own exhibition with then-wife Barbara Rose and curator Henry Geldzahler, entitled Shape and Structure, 1965. The exhibition included almost as many sculptors as it did painters: Carl Andre, Bannard, Larry Bell, Charles Hinman, Will Insley, Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Robert Murray, Neil Williams, and Larry Zox. “We used that term [structure] because what we were making seemed more like structures than paintings. They were painted things that related to painting, but also related to other things in the world that were built.” From this point onward, Stella—embracing simple, and sometimes not so simple, forms of geometry—would create systems of building abstraction rather than simply inventing singular, new shapes.

Stella’s built-up abstractions would also fall under the rubric of “Specific Objects,” the title of Donald Judd’s often-cited 1965 text, which was a definitional prelude to Minimalism.7 Dispensing with the terms “painting” and “sculpture,” Judd suggested that these new objects had a Duchampian aspect that placed them somewhere between art and, as Stella has said, “other things in the world.” Stella’s use of common industrial paint—deploying paint as if it were a found industrial object rather than a material for painting pictures— contributed to the notion of this hybrid identity. His built abstractions were right at home with the work of other artists who were experimenting with industrial materials, such as Andre, with his use of steel plates; John Chamberlain, with his sprayed lacquer paintings

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and automobile part sculptures; Dan Flavin, with his fluorescent lights; and Judd, in his use of galvanized aluminum, steel, and Plexiglas.

The systemic methodology of these artists and the industrial character of their materials reflected what could be described as a “working-class attitude” toward art making. While Stella and many other artists of his generation were academically trained, they also absorbed the American pragmatist philosophy of John Dewey, who envisioned art as an everyday activity in which problems are identified and worked through in a series of logical steps, much as one would approach the making of any object, be it fine art or functional. The Minimalist attraction to industrial materials was accompanied by a blue-collar posture. For example, throughout much of his career, Carl Andre wore denim overalls to signal his identity as a worker.

Stella was producing paintings that, as he put it, were “facts of life,” and his choice of aluminum paint, used for coating public railings and radiators, must be seen as part of this philosophy, along with his comment that he chose it because it was “cheap and available.” ­Stella was declaring paint to be just another industrial ready-made, to use Marcel Duchamp’s now-famous terminology. It was a material comparable to any other product on display in the hardware store. Stella’s paintings helped create a lineage of “found color,” a bridge between Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918), which depicted a common swatch of colors found in a paint store, and the German artist Gerhard Richter’s painting of a color chart (Ten Colours [1966]). In both cases, color is a found object, and Stella was a link between the two.

Color was no longer associated with emotion, but with commodity culture.

Nonetheless, Stella was not ready to abandon the visceral aspect of any type of paint. Besides appreciating the availability of aluminum paint, he also embraced its physicality and oddly mechanical sensuality. As someone who had painted his fair share of houses, fine art oils seemed too “arty” and slippery, whereas the new acrylic paints that had been developed over the previous decade were “wimpy” and “rubbery.” He preferred the heavy, industrial-strength paints he had learned to use while painting houses. John Chamberlain referred to Stella as a “sculptor’s painter,” and the lines of the Aluminum series could almost be described as sculptural. In fact, it took a physical effort to paint these works. Existing somewhere between liquid oil and metal, aluminum paint tends to drag rather than slide as it is applied, and in the end the liquid material sits up on the canvas surface. In their physicality, these works

Fig. 3 Installation view of Frank Stella at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, April 28–May 19, 1962 Fig. 4 Installation view of Carl Andre: Cuts at the Dwan Gallery, Los Angeles, March 1967. Dwan Gallery (Los Angeles and New York) records, Archives of American Art, Smith­ sonian Institution 3

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hang uncomfortably alongside other paintings, as if they belong in another category.

Although at the time they may have looked more like machine-made objects than paintings, the works in the Aluminum series possess a strangely painterly quality. Because aluminum paint has a high oil content, the oil subtly bleeds out of the edges of Stella’s brushstrokes into the unsized canvas, like oil gently leaking from a machine. This materiality is also not without its illusionism. Depending on the intensity of their lighting, the Aluminum Paintings have a subtle halolike effect as the light reflects off the granules of suspended metal that, combined with the thickness of the stretchers Stella used, creates the suggestion of the painting hovering in front of the wall. The wall was not mere support, however, and the notches of these paintings were not just about shape. They brought the wall into play—an important step in his increasing engagement with architecture.

As Stella was working his way through the con­ figurations he had chosen for the Aluminum Paintings, he continued to make more drawings for new shaped

paintings driven by the question, how much can be taken away from a painting and still have it be perceived as a painting? In the subsequent Copper series (1960–61), Stella did not just remove notches from the canvas rectangle, he took huge sections away, creating the effect of having more empty space than physical painting (fig. 3). As he had done in the Black and Aluminum Paintings, he painted long strokes that echo and reinforce the canvas shape. The metallic copper paint he used for this new series was a barnacleinhibiting paint he had employed the previous summer on the hull of his father’s boat. As this paint was less absorbent than the aluminum paint, he needed even more layers to get a substantial line. Because of the more pronounced grittiness of the copper paint, and the reddish hue, the surfaces of the Copper Paintings appear even more “sculptural.” These paintings con­ stitute what might be thought of as the “Early Renaissance of Minimalism,” the point at which focused perception of a painting or sculpture is combined with phenomenological scanning of context. Here, attention is equally divided between the painted object and the

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empty wall space that cuts into it. The Copper Paintings offered a pictorial prelude to Andre’s famous site-specific work Cuts, presented at the Dwan Gallery in 1967, in which the artist installed a single layer of concrete black capstones across the floor of the gallery, leaving rectilinear negative openings to the floor (fig. 4).

It was a work of sculpture that was both on the floor and was the floor, but left the viewer wondering whether its presence was the result of the blocks that rose just off the ground or the space that opened down to it. Stella’s Copper Paintings have the same effect, but on the wall, integrating the architectural support into the composition of the painting.

Robert Irwin, who painted his way into work that was broadly spatial and decidedly phenomenological in its intentions, saw Stella’s Aluminum and Copper Paintings early on. He recalled the impression they made on him as follows: “You didn’t know what to make of them as paintings or objects. They just sat there in their gritty inertness and asked to be analyzed against the wall. That’s what you did with a Stella. You analyzed it, like it was an equation. You didn’t get religious. You didn’t feel all fuzzy. Whether you liked it or not, you just tried to figure out its relationship to things around it. Sometimes you looked more at the wall than the painting, which is not necessarily a criticism. We were all becoming phenomenologists at the time.”8 Indeed, in a 1964 radio interview, Stella made what may be the bluntest phenomenological statement in history. When asked what his recent Black, Aluminum, and Copper Paintings meant, he famously responded, “What you see is what you see.”9 Of course, Stella knew that what you see is a function of how you see and how you visually digest a room or environment, the key theme of phenomenology and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s widely read Phenomenology of Perception, published in 1945.

Stella never read the book, but to say that this notion was in the air in the 1960s would be an understatement, and he likely had discussions with Michael Fried, a critic and friend from Princeton, who touches on phenomenology in many of his texts. Stella has said, “I just wasn’t a card-carrying phenomenologist,” yet he nonetheless understood the premise that a work of art is not simply about creating a special inner or autonomous meaning, but that it should spark a collaboration between the viewer, the object, and the space or context they share. Stella’s subsequent work would be increasingly about coming to terms with that shared space.

Perhaps more than that of any artist of the 1960s, Stella’s work provoked a number of philosophical positions that could be construed as a narrative of

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points and counterpoints that made painting and its pictorial viewpoint seem to be either the most pure of artistic models or the most outdated. Greenberg promoted Stella’s materiality and flatness as the essential and defining characteristics of late modernist painting, while still maintaining that we should feel as if we are looking at a picture bound by its surface and edges.10 In “Specific Objects,” discussed above, Judd wrote about the thickness of Stella’s canvases and the importance of addressing literal as opposed to pictorial space. The Minimalist Robert Morris took Judd’s notion of literal space one step further into Merleau-Ponty’s terrain; in his “Notes on Sculpture” from 1966, he reiterated Merleau-Ponty’s argument that our experience of modern art is not a funneled, pictorial one, but rather a situation in which the perceiving body experiences a work by moving around it, absorbing all of its objectness.11 Claiming that this essentially diluted the aesthetic experience into a vague “theatricality,” Fried—a protégé of Greenberg—argued against Minimalism’s wandering viewpoints. In his often-cited “Art and Objecthood” of 1967, Fried criticized Minimalism’s environmental scanning, promoting a clear distinction between pictorial space and literal space.

Discussing Stella’s recent work, Fried wrote, “What is at stake in this is whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects: and what decides their identity as painting is their confronting the demand that they hold as shapes. Otherwise, they are experienced as nothing more than objects. This can be summed up in the assertion that modernist painting has come to find it imperative that it defeat or suspend its own objecthood.”12 In other words, the traditional, rectangular, window-like shape of painting creates a unique reality, separate from the literal space of a room. Fried’s assertion is that to maintain its integrity, painting needed to keep this separate reality.

Stella would later argue that there is no reason one could not address both types of perceptions. “What the best art does,” Stella wrote in 1991, “is give us the best of both worlds—the perceptual and the pictorial.”13 He implemented this hybrid view of painting by tunneling his pictoriality literally into the wall. In 1964, he showed a series of polygonal canvases, each with a correspondingly shaped hole in its center. His by-then signature painted lines therefore follow both the exterior and interior edges of the paintings. In one of the earlier Aluminum Paintings, Stella had removed a small notch from the center of the work, just barely revealing the wall. In this new series, the Purple Paintings (1963),

Fig. 5 Installation view of Frank Stella at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, March 24–June 2, 1970 (paintings); March 24–May 24, 1970 (drawings). Photographic Archives, The Museum of Modern Art Archives

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the central, empty section has been radically enlarged (fig. 5). Stella’s pictorial phenomenology is not without a sense of humor. Acknowledging the gradual elimination of the frame from modern painting, he makes the painting a frame for the wall. His concentric stripes now lead the eye into the center of the painting, where the possibility of depth is abruptly halted—where we are no longer facing a painting, but the wall. The specific shapes of these paintings—trapezoid, pentagon, hexagon, octagon, and decagon—were each named after one of the artist’s friends, creating a tongue-in-cheek set of abstract portraits.14 The critic Brian O’Doherty, however, found them to be empty portraits, “semi-icons for a spiritual blank,” and pronounced Stella to be “the Oblomov of art, the Cézanne of nihilism, the master of ennui.”15 For Stella, the open sections were neither symbolic nor critical of the con­cept of “the void” that had been a part of the Abstract Expressionist lexicon. They simply acknowledged the wall as a partner of modernist abstraction.

The Minimalists were very conscious of architecture and its effect on the perception of their art, and they felt that engaging architecture was the means of not being defeated by it. Sol LeWitt was quick to recognize the empty sections of Stella’s paintings as signifying the wall’s importance to the art of his generation. “Those holes in the paintings,” LeWitt remembered, “offered a peek into site specificity. It was ironic that it would come from a Greenbergian painter. The next step would be to simply eliminate the canvas and paint directly on the wall, which fortunately he never did. He left that to me, well, and the cave painters, who came before all of us.”16 Stella’s stripes of paint circumscribed the architecture of the stretched canvas, which opened up to the wall, while LeWitt would later use pencil lines to circumscribe the parameters of an entire room (fig. 6).

In retrospect, it seems ironic that the “ennui” O’Doherty described in Stella’s art might have been the early seed

Fig. 6 Sol LeWitt, Wall Drawing #51, 1970. All architectural points connected by straight lines. Installation at Museo di Torino, Turin, Italy

of an idea that would lead to O’Doherty’s most famous text, “Inside the White Cube” (1976), regarding the omnipresence of the white-walled space in contemporary art. Over the next few decades, Stella would find many unique ways of utilizing that space. However, rather than engaging the site specificity that LeWitt would pioneer with his Wall Drawings in the early 1970s, Stella would make the wall part of the picture plane, creating an expanded, hybrid space that was both pictorial and literal.

Geometry as Gesture The fundamental vocabulary of modernist abstraction has involved a dialectic between gesture and geometry: Kandinsky vs. Malevich and, later, Pollock and de Kooning vs. Newman and Reinhardt. Each would seem to represent a distinct and opposing choice: autographic gesture being idiosyncratic, unpredictable, and personal, while geometry is iconic, classical, and logical.

The history of abstraction is populated by artists who have felt obliged to choose between one or the other, or who have had unsettled positions between the two poles. As he had not seen a reason to make pictorial and literal space mutually exclusive, Stella also did not see why gesture and geometry could not be interchangeable forms.

Toward the middle of the 1960s, Stella employed geometry less as “structure,” the word he had used to describe his early shaped paintings, and more as a form of gestural language. In fact, the earlier Copper Paintings resembled language in that their shapes took the form of letters: T, U, L, H. Stella’s Notched V series (1964–65) proposes that a “V” is a naturally notched form, but with the added dimension of suggesting directional force, like an arrow. Although large and heftily constructed like his previous notched works,

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the Notched V Paintings have an aerodynamic quality, in which a Franz Kline–like gesture is rendered with geometric clarity. These paintings established a new category of expressionist abstraction, constituting yet another bridge from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. Translating the gestural side of Abstract Expressionism into sleek, precisely constructed, geometric Minimalist forms, and expanding the size of the paintings so that they dominated the rooms in which they were hung, Stella gave Minimalism, generally iconic in design, a uniquely dynamic punch.

Stacked like children’s building blocks, the Notched V works present an elegant march across a wall. For Stella, Minimalist objectness was not synonymous with stillness; throughout his career, his abstractions would distinguish themselves by their animated character.

In one of the earliest assessments of Stella’s work of the 1960s, Robert Rosenblum referred to this series as comprising “restless forms” that implied “mechanized speed, whose lineage could be traced through the streamlining in commercial machine design of the 1920s and 1930s back to the ‘lines of force’ in Italian futurist art.”17 The machine aesthetic could be a function not only of their apparent “speed,” but also their metallic surfaces. Stella continued to explore the properties of paint, in this case mixing metallic powder into a clear acrylic binder. He applied this medium with a small roller, creating a smoother surface than in prior paintings, allowing the viewer’s gaze to quickly slip down his painted lines. In the Notched V series, the vectors point in a myriad of directions, so that, as with the Copper Paintings, our eyes are partially directed away from the painting and toward the surrounding wall.

Always drawing from art history and various aspects of the science of perception, Stella also references the illusions of gestalt perception created by geometric patterns, described by the perceptual psychologist Rudolf Arnheim in his widely read Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1956). In the Running V series (1964–65), Stella combines three categories of illusion in Arnheim’s book: shape, form, and movement. Here, all three categories are operating simultaneously. The shape matches the form, both of which initially appear flat, until our eyes follow them laterally. The lines of the Running V Paintings forge a horizontal journey that zigzags across the wall. At certain points, their horizontality is interrupted when all of the lines are redirected in an obliquely vertical or downward movement, creating an illusion of depth and making the picture plane appear to buckle like an accordion. This buckling creates a fictive space in front

23 Phenomenology of Frank

of and into the wall, as the angled lines simultaneously appear to press out from it and into it. Although illusionism was a negative quality for both the Greenbergians and the Minimalists, Stella found it a useful tool in animating the painted object.

Because Stella did not adhere to any single philosophy of art making, his work appears increasingly diverse as it develops throughout the 1960s, which is undoubtedly why his name is included in discussions of the many different movements making up that complex decade. Stella was a crossing point for many of them, in various ways touching on Color Field painting, Minimalism, Conceptualism, Pop Art, and Op Art. Within each of those movements, however, Stella found a way to make his work fit uncomfortably, so that it questioned the overt premise of the movement. While Stella appreciated Judd’s assertion that art should stress its literal aspects, particularly in regard to space, Stella had no intention of completely abandoning illusionism. In the early interview between him, Judd, Flavin, and Bruce Glaser, Stella makes this point, even exaggerating it by comparing his paintings with those of Victor Vasarely, one of the pioneers of Op Art, the epitome of abstract illusionism.18 However, unlike Vasarely’s imagery, which mesmerizes the eyes with gently bulging form, Stella’s illusions are less mind-bending than mind-jostling.

“I’m Not a Colorist” At the time Stella was making radically shaped can­ vases, he was also working with square canvases. This return to a traditional, pictorial (window-like) format allowed him to present intensely concentrated color experiences. Stella’s self-deprecating statement “I’m not a colorist” refers to the fact that, for him, the function of color is not beauty, symbolism, or metaphor for its own sake. Within his abstractions, color is employed to manipulate our perception of space. He is arguably one of the most experimental colorists in postwar art, not only in his use of enamel and metallic paints, but of new fluorescent colors as well.

“Aggressive” is the best word to describe Stella’s palette. Just as he had used the canvas shape as a form of gesture, he now embraced color as a gestural force.

The spectral wavelengths of Stella’s color choices almost feel like they have a physical dimension. His square paintings of the early 1960s utilize the color surface plane as if it were a trampoline being pushed and bounced by divergent color changes, in a manner ranging from a

general sizzle of color interaction to an almost sculptural presence. The Moroccan series (1964–65), partially inspired by bright Arabic tile patterns, is made with fluorescent paint, which absorbs and reflects light with such intensity that the color virtually swells from the surface. In some cases, the color is so intense it appears to throw itself across the room, like a warning sign.

Spot-lit in a gallery, these paintings can leave an afterimage that stays with you throughout the gallery after turning away. In fact, they are best looked at from a distance, in order to process the color and illusion of Stella’s geometry. As the bands of color travel across the picture surface diagonally, each band is interrupted by a color change that sequentially lines up with color changes on the other bands, creating a line or what appears to be a deep wrinkle in the picture plane. Here, Stella uses illusionism to distort the flat objectness of the painting into something that expands out from the wall, radiating its presence into the room.

In other paintings, Stella uses colors as if they were as inert and hard as the wall itself. The Benjamin Moore series (1961) is named after the American paint company that produces high-quality interior house paints (see plate 20). As opposed to the glossy and reflective commercial metallic paints he had used previously, or the fluorescent paints that almost appear to glow, the interior household paints were designed to have a matte finish. The color is neither projective nor visually absorbent, but, as Stella puts it, “dead.” Yet, our per­ ception of these paintings would indicate that they are not as dead as the artist might have us think. They are tactile, like slabs collaged onto the surface of the canvas, and have a singular presence, the way a wall painted an odd color comes out at you in a flash. The color is applied in bands—some that follow the shape of the square canvas, and others that simply traverse it horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The empty spaces of canvas between the color bands were carefully masked during the painting process, leaving no traces of a bleed or minute gesture, and the paint has been applied evenly, as if by machine. With less textural interference in the application of the paint, the eye moves more quickly across the surface. The bands slip and slide, carrying our gaze around and over these paintings. However, we cannot penetrate the surface.

The colored elements hold us back, just as the unpainted areas next to them suggest a vague light pushing out from within, a kind of Minimalist version of Rothko­ esque backlight imprisoned by bars.

Stella’s use of eye-popping color and commonly available house paint in once-fashionable designer hues

formed another bridge between contemporary movements, in this case between the industrial aesthetic of Minimalism and the new color vibrancy of Pop Art. Andy Warhol was so impressed by the Benjamin Moore series that he bought a set of the canvases. While Warhol’s own colors often range from dazzling to melancholic, Stella’s approach is more like that of a mad color scientist, but with an academic pedigree. In fact, Stella has often spoken of the importance of the paintings and writings of Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers, both important teachers for at least three generations of American artists. Hofmann’s descriptions of the subtleties regarding the ability of color to “push and pull” paralleled the theories espoused in Albers’s widely distributed Interaction of Color, first published in 1963 and since read by virtually every serious art student.

The Minimalists were particularly interested in Albers’s ideas concerning the role of color in the perception of space and materiality. Judd had multiple copies of Interaction of Color in his library, one of which was signed by Albers.

Albers’s famous Homage to the Square series (1950–76) consists of compositions with three or four concentric squares of color precisely situated within a square canvas. The color of each square, sometimes applied straight out of the can as Stella would later do, is calculated to interact with and affect our impression of the color beside it in a harmonic way. Albers’s Squares are arguably the most serene forms of geometric abstraction in American art. His optical studies, along with Arnheim’s writings, were developed by a succeeding generation of artists in the 1960s into something more dramatized and mannered, in the movement known as Op Art, of which Stella was briefly considered to be a part. His work was included in the signature exhibition of that movement, The Responsive Eye, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1965. Even then, his paintings must have seemed almost antagonistic to the pleasing abstract illusionism that dominated Op Art. The hyper-energized color combinations of Stella’s Concentric Squares and Mitered Mazes (1962– 63) might even be interpreted as mocking Albers’s serene aesthetic—Albers’s zen-like opticality replaced by a stress test for color compatibility.

The color optics of the Concentric Squares and Mitered Maze Paintings is dizzyingly kaleidoscopic.

Continuing the use of Benjamin Moore paint, and continuing to paint tightly masked stripes in a concentric manner, Albers’s color interactions are amplified into high-intensity friction. Just as Stella had previously asked himself how much of a painting could be taken

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Fig. 7 Hollis Frampton, #23 (430 fenestration), from The Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958–62. Gelatin silver print, 7 1/2 × 9 1/2 in. (18.9 × 24 cm). Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass.; gift of Marion Faller, Addison Art Drive 1990.34.23

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away and still have it read as a painting, he now seemed to be asking how much color could be fitted into a pictorial structure. Drawings and notes in Stella’s archives indicate that he began with two basic systems of color combinations: “color progression schemes” and “color opposition schemes.” He started with seven colors from the Benjamin Moore catalogue—red, yellow, blue, green, orange, indigo, and violet—the three primaries and their complements. The colors were straight out of the can. In many cases, Stella began by following the order of the spectrum. The pattern may not always start with red, sometimes picking up mid-sequence, but it cycles through from there. For many of the Concentric Squares, the pattern flips at one point; following the pattern from outer edge inward, for example, the color sequence suddenly reverses. In other words, Stella set predetermined rules for himself, while changing and inventing new rules along the way to create combative color interactions within a systemic pattern. The Concentric Squares are like visual traps that lure our eyes into a descending well of color motion.

Some of the borderline lurid colors have the effect of flashing lights rather than soft color bands, bringing to mind Ad Reinhardt’s famous statement “There is something wrong, irresponsible, and mindless about color, something impossible to control.”19 Stella simultaneously gives us the impression of control and chaos.

Stella pressed his optical gamesmanship further with the Double Concentric Squares, complicating our reading of his partly rational, partly idiosyncratic color systems by creating two abutted squares, each doing its best to draw us into its system. Of course, because of the vectored nature of our vision, we cannot read each

25 Phenomenology of Frank

work’s two squares at the same time, though we continually frustrate ourselves trying. One solution would be to walk to one side of the painting and then the other, looking at each side on its own, a solution that accords with the phenomenological aspects of Minimalism.

That is, the viewer must move in order to understand what appears to be a simple gestalt, as was the case with Robert Morris’s installation Untitled (L-Beams) (1965), in which identical right angle forms were installed such that they did not appear identical until the viewer walked around them. In a similar manner, Stella presents us with related, but different gestalts. We can move from one side’s square to the other’s, but we cannot comprehend both fields at once.

In the Mitered Mazes, the color sequences are broken up into four quadrants, divided by four diagonal lines creating an “X” across the surface of the canvas.

All the lines of the X extend to the corners of the canvas, except for one; that diagonal starts just left or right of its corner—an element that is not noticed until the color bands meet, or, in this case, fail to meet, in the center of the canvas. Combined with the changing concentric bands of color, this disruption in the center of the image creates a twisting, pinwheel-like movement. This color spinning relates as much to the early color experiments of the Synchromists Morgan Russell and Stanton MacDonald-Wright in the beginning years of abstraction as to Albers. In their work, color evokes space as well as motion through the positions of color forms around the picture surface. From Synchromism to Albers and Pollock, and undoubtedly a few others along the way, Stella learned that color makes space not only appear material, but also fluid and active.

Fig. 8 Kazimir Malevich, Suprematist Composition (with blue triangle and black rectangle), 1915. Oil on canvas, 26 1/4 × 22 1/2 in. (66.5 × 57 cm). Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam

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Fig. 9 El Lissitzky, Proun Room, 1923, reconstruction, 1971. Painted wood, 126 × 143 3/8 × 143 3/8 in. (320 × 360 × 360 cm). Collection Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands

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Stacked and Spring-Loaded Geometries One of Hollis Frampton’s photographs from The Secret World of Frank Stella shows the artist fearfully posed inside a deep, square niche in a wall, looking trapped and apprehensive about being hemmed in by the small, square space (fig. 7). The photograph could be Stella’s symbolic warning to himself. The focalized simplicity of a square format worked as a foil for the artist’s optical experiments, but the shaped—and eventually to be deconstructed—picture plane is where Stella put his mark on postwar painting.

In his Irregular Polygons (1965–66), Stella began shaping his paintings in a more radical way. Unlike the regular polygons he had previously employed, which are symmetrical with all sides being of equal length, the sides of an irregular polygon are not equal, and the form is asymmetrical. As Stella continued to thicken his stretchers, these canvases have an even greater physical presence than his earlier shaped works, while their brightly colored bands and planes create the illusion that they are oscillating between stability and instability, on the verge of falling or flying apart, held together only by the thinner, bordering bands. Because of the size of these paintings, the wall is now fully engaged as a huge, pictorial, abstract plane. There are eleven different compositions in the series, each combining varying numbers of shapes to create irregular, if not peculiar, outlines. The artist made four versions of each composition, altering the color combinations of the shapes, producing various spatial effects like tilting, twisting, and folding. Because of the physical presence of these thickly stretched canvases, the Irregular Polygons look as much stacked together as painted, illusionistic images of imagined sculptures of irregular

building blocks held together by a fictional gravity.

Stella remembers that at the time he had numerous ideas for sculptures he never realized: “The ideas just weren’t very good. They didn’t have enough going on. I need illusion and the challenge of playing off the idea of a picture,” even if the end result of the painting barely resembles a “picture.” Indeed, many of the Irregular Polygons appear as giant origami, folding and unfolding in the amorphous space of the white wall.

Some of the works suggest a pent-up energy that seems to want to force its way out of the picture, as in the Chocorua composition and its colorful variations (1965–66; see plate 31). The Irregular Polygon cycle was inspired by the painting Suprematist Composition (with blue triangle and black rectangle) (1915; fig. 8), by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, in which a triangular blue shape is placed over a black rectangle, creating a third geometric form. When Stella is looking for a new idea, he often returns to the history of abstraction to find previous inventions that could be reinterpreted or expanded upon. For Stella, the overlapping effect of Malevich’s two-part composition could be made more forceful not only by radically enlarging it, but by creating the perception that the two forms had been physically pushed together. By bordering his combined forms with bands, he created a kind of elastic effect, like a rubber band being stretched into tension. This work, as well as many others that Stella would create over the next decade, suggests torque, a term used in mechanical engineering to measure the implied force of an engine that is revving but being held still. Stella’s parallel is a static image with an implied force. He described the illusion in physical and spatial terms: “When I pushed the bands into the rectangle or the square, they had a really interesting quality. You could feel something

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Fig. 10 John Baldessari, A 1968 Painting, 1968. Acrylic and photo-emulsion on canvas, 59 × 45 in. (149.9 × 114.3 cm)

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like what happens when you make sculpture, when you are pushing something together . . . like it was spring-­ loaded and about to shoot into space.”

Stella’s interest in revisiting Russian Suprematism and Constructivism is periodically manifested throughout the rest of his career. While early American proponents of abstraction, notably the members of the American Abstract Artists group of the 1930s and 1940s, embraced the strictness of Piet Mondrian’s balanced, relational planarity, the Minimalists discerned the greater spatial implications of the early Russian abstractionists and their interest in establishing links between painting, sculpture, performance, and architecture, as leading to more open-ended investigations for the future of abstraction. Along with the work of Malevich, Stella has found that of El Lissitzky to be particularly interesting for revealing the potential space for abstract painting. The echo of Lissitzky’s tilted planes, creating distorted perspectives against seemingly transparent spatial backgrounds, finds various interpretations in Stella’s work from this point onward.

But even more important for Stella’s evolution was Lissitzky’s radical Proun rooms of the 1920s (fig. 9), in which he sought to combine Malevich’s planar vocabulary of pure, abstract form with a more direct engagement with literal space. Lissitzky characterized his Prouns (Russian for “Project for the Affirmation of the New”) as an “interchange station between painting and architecture,” and said that he treated the canvas as a building site.20 In them, he applied his geometric forms directly to the walls, creating an abstract artwork in the round. The geometric forms vary in thickness and

27 Phenomenology of Frank

suggest different depths of perspective, some literally bending around the corner of the room. The result is a complete engagement with the volume of the room.

With the Irregular Polygons, Stella told William Rubin, who curated both of Stella’s retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, that he was questioning the future of abstract painting and the form it would eventually take. Rubin later summarized that question as such: “How much could he [Stella] subsume from the neighboring plastic arts of sculpture and architecture and still be making paintings?”21 During the 1960s and 1970s, Stella resisted a total engagement with architecture, preferring to blur the line between pictorial space and literal space. With their blunt, muscular planes, the Irregular Polygons are uniquely situated not only between Malevich and Lissitzky, but also in a larger European/American narrative of spatial development that was more material in nature. They appear to fill an unacknowledged void between the faceted Cubism of Braque and Picasso and the development of American sculpture in the 1950s and 1960s, specifically the Cubis of David Smith and the crawling, crystalline geometries of Tony Smith. Stella was measuring space incrementally, working his way into, out from, and around the picture plane.

Popular Abstraction As his geometry would continue to transform into new and unexpected configurations, the material character of Stella’s paintings also continued to expand—if not

literally covering the walls of museums and galleries, then illusionistically swallowing them up. In his Protractor Paintings (1967–71), Stella deployed the ancient and elegant drafting tool popularized in high school math classes of the postwar generation, releasing the tension in the bands of the Irregular Polygons into a rhythmic and lateral flow. Consisting of wide bands of fluorescent and pastel colors in circular and arch-like forms interlaced on large, horizontal canvases, the Protractors suggest channels of color kinetically revolving on the wall. In some cases, squares are inserted into the mostly linear compositional elements, suggesting abstract pictures tumbling across the wall. Stella installed these paintings in such a way that they almost filled the wall space of a room, evoking abstract frescoes that absorb and animate their surroundings. Often, the paintings became so large that they outgrew the walls of contemporary galleries and houses. Some found unlikely homes in corporate and public lobbies. No abstract artist has been as welcomed into such situations as Stella. Indeed, Stella has been a pioneer in bringing abstract art to a larger public. In his words, “There is nothing wrong with abstraction being liked outside the art world. There is an implication that it makes the art less intelligent. Sometimes I think you could argue the opposite.”

The Protractor works are arguably the artist’s best-known and most popular paintings, nearly as famous as Warhol’s Marilyn or Campbell’s Soup Can paintings, a remarkable fact given the public’s often bewildered attitude toward abstract art. They were so ubiquitous in their day—often through printed reproductions—that, à la Warhol, the artist John Baldessari made a silkscreen painting of one of the Protractors with the text “A 1968 PAINTING” (fig. 10). As Baldessari remembers, “Stella’s Protractors were at the time the essence of the clean, well-made, and broadly understood abstract painting. It was the perfect example of popular abstraction.”22 Another artist described them as “dazzling, but unbearably pretty,”23 “pretty” not being a term of praise in the contemporary art world.

With the Protractors, Stella transgressed one of the most controversial boundaries of modernist art. He was willfully merging abstraction, the cutting edge of twentiethcentury art, with the decorative, long thought by many to be the nemesis of the avant-garde.24 Stella was not bashful about his intentions. In 1969, he declared, “My main interest has been to make what is popularly called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms. . . . Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. I don’t know, but that’s where I’d like my painting to go.”25

Given the near-architectural scale of some of the Protractors—many named after Near and Middle Eastern cities and architectural structures such as gates—it is odd to think that these works could also be inspired by the delicate, decorative borders of the hand-held genre of manuscript illumination. An essay Stella wrote during his junior year at Princeton discusses illuminated manuscripts of the medieval period.26 Of the essay, Stella has said, “People make a bigger deal out of that than they should. It was really a history paper, not an art paper, but I did use art in it.” Despite the artist’s downplaying the significance of the paper, the nature and character of manuscript illumination— decidedly linear, baroque, and spatially deceptive—is revealing in regard to Stella’s career as a whole. The radically abstracted and concentric nature of manuscript painting, revolving around a book page, is translated into Stella’s early Black, Aluminum, and Copper Paintings, as well as the color bands of his Concentric Squares. Needless to say, manuscript illumination’s ornate imagery had to be radically boiled down in Stella’s case; in fact, Stella’s paper also references Pollock’s drip paintings as far as the spatial layering, involving the illusion of projection and recessive depth, which was characteristic of both manuscript painting and contemporary abstraction of the day. Pollock’s abstract linearity provided a transitional stage for Stella’s future abstract designs. Stella would amplify the spatial layering of both precedents throughout his career.

As Stella has described it, the seemingly chaotic splashes of paint that cover Pollock’s canvases were “a challenge to my more methodical way of thinking. I was trying to figure out how he [Pollock] was articulating the space in his paintings. It made sense to me that patterning was involved.” The linear interlacing that is central to both manuscript illumination and Pollock’s paintings is particularly evident in Stella’s Protractor series. The direct and generally concentric nature of his early striped paintings is here replaced by an interwoven arrangement of color bands. Overlapping and, in turn, overlapped, the bands of color establish a simple yet labyrinthine arrangement. A sense of spatial depth is created as the bands simultaneously appear to advance and retreat. There is an illusion of depth, but also of projection, made even more palpable by the thickness of these massive stretched canvases.

Of course, Stella was not the only modern artist to be inspired by the decorative impulse. Henri Matisse set the bar very high in his ability to absorb decorative patterning and translate it into gestural painting. There is, in fact, a Matissean quality to the Protractors, as if

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the great French master’s rhythmic composition The Dance (1909) has been mathematically diagrammed and geometrically reconfigured. One supposes that Matisse, also a daring colorist, would have understood the boldness of the strange pastel, Day-Glo hues of the Protractor Paintings, which have an acidic luminosity on a large scale. What particularly impressed Stella about Matisse’s paintings was “the powerful assault of the senses,” as well as the sheer “physical presence of the color.”

Stella’s Protractors have a similar effect. Given the massive size of paintings today—think Anselm Kiefer—it may be hard for the current generation to appreciate the impression these paintings made when they were first exhibited. Standing before these behemoths of their time was like being in the center of a rainbow circling over a wall. Even when Stella would interject squares into the composition, presumably to disrupt the flowing nature of the bands of color, there is still a rhythm to these paintings that transforms the strict rectilinearity of a room into a fluid spatial experience.

That fluidity propelled his work into the 1970s, manifested even in his stained glass window designs using Protractor-like compositions for a proposed building project for Philip Johnson. However, by the beginning of that decade, the soft rhythms of the Protractors would be replaced by Stella’s periodic need to deconstruct and destabilize the picture plane. In retrospect, Stella’s compositions over the course of his career have vacillated between consolidation and fragmentation. As such, the halcyon atmosphere of the gentle giants of the Protractor series would give way to a pseudo-­architectural planarity that was fractured and disruptive.

Collage Space The year 1970 put a punctuation mark on Stella’s diverse, prolific, and critically skyrocketing career. That year, the Museum of Modern Art recognized his importance with a retrospective. The artist was thirty-four years old, far younger than other artists to have received such an honor. Rather than congratulate himself, Stella used this forced appraisal of his young career, and a coincidental hospital stay for knee surgery, to consider what he had not yet done with and to abstract painting.

The result was a barrage of drawings from the hospital.

Yet, as Stella has often confessed, “I don’t know how to draw in the sense of pure drawing. I need to go to the material stage as quickly as I can.”

While in the hospital, Stella read the book Wooden Synagogues, by Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka, given to

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him by the architect Richard Meier. The drawings he was simultaneously making would later become the paintings of the Polish Village series, named after Polish synagogues destroyed in World War II. The paintings evoke a unique cross between the pictorial and the architectonic. In this case, reaching the “material stage” meant making paintings that added yet another physical dimension to the picture plane—in fact, multiple dimensions. The quickest and most direct way to make a picture plane more physical is through collage. In school, Stella had admired the work of Kurt Schwitters and had casually practiced collage as a student. While Stella has frequently acknowledged Johns as an early influence, he also credits Robert Rauschenberg for his experimentation with materials.

Rauschenberg’s famous statement about wanting to operate in the gap between art and life was later rephrased by Stella specifically in the context of painting: “Art wants real, durable, extensive surfaces to work on; it does not want to be limited by the refined surfaces of recent abstraction, inertly pliant and neatly cropped cotton duck.”27 Once again looking back to Russian avant-garde abstraction, Stella echoes the Constructivist sculptor Vladimir Tatlin’s call for “real materials in real space,”28 but in the spirit of advancing the practice of painting, even pictorial painting.

The Polish Village series (1971–73) started out as essentially large-scale collages in which the surface physicality was developed incrementally, beginning as stretched canvases to which the artist applied paper and felt in various colors that he had cut out. Matisse had said of his own paper cut-outs, “Cutting directly into vivid color . . . reminds me . . . of the direct carving of sculptors.”29 It would be safe to describe the works of the ­Polish Village series as sculptural paintings. As Stella’s process developed, thicker materials like plywood, pressboard, and Masonite were mounted on wood. In the end, the Polish Village works are not simply shaped, but fitted, suggesting a tongue-in-groove construction referencing the architectural subject of their titles. The architect Frank Gehry has said, “All art is a building process, and the only difference between architecture and art is that architects have to provide windows and doors.” Gehry has also noted that Stella’s deconstructive/constructive tendencies in the 1970s subtly influenced his own approach to “peeling” the planes of architecture away, so that he could “create layers of exterior space.”30 With this cycle, Stella’s peeling and fragmenting reconfigured the picture plane into discrete but connected units of different colors, thicknesses, and angles. The result is an unsettling mix of

both pictorial/illusionistic space and literal/physical space. Illusionism is created through the angling of physical form, while different colors make the forms themselves illusive. To complicate our reading of this increasingly projective space, a plane that angles inward may be painted with a color that pushes forward.

The concept of building a painted object out from the wall was not unique to Stella; Chamberlain, Rauschenberg, Louise Nevelson, and James Rosenquist, not to mention numerous European artists, all began to move out from the wall during the decade of the 1960s.

What distinguished Stella was that he did so while always acknowledging his identity as a painter, rather than a sculptor. In the early phases of the Polish Village series, he negotiated a precise spatial zone between a painted surface and a wall-bound relief sculpture. Stella was keeping painting in an illusive space that was not readily definable and did not allow the viewer to quickly understand the space. While it could be argued that this was a repudiation of the Minimalist aesthetic, which seemed to offer its objectness instantly to the viewer’s perception, in fact it was an extension of Minimalism’s contention that you needed to move around the object, inspecting both the front and the sides, to perceive its gestalt.

Stella subsequently cast some of the Polish Village series pieces in aluminum honeycombed panels fitted tightly together, creating a seamless object, sometimes painted in multiple colors, at other times in monochrome.

None of these parallels the comforting flatness of the wall, but, rather, mocks it with an unstable topography.

In some cases, deep, dark channels cut into the form as if in search of a stable, inner picture plane. These later paintings, which are perhaps more akin to relief, neither acknowledge a relationship to the floor, nor orient themselves toward the rectilinearity of the wall.

Like a futuristic spaceship wing, they spin, project, and collapse amid the amorphous whiteness of the wall.

Stella’s process in making the Polish Village ­paintings corresponds to that of an architect, utilizing a computer to diagram the compositions, then a computer-assisted table saw for the cuts of the planes.

His instincts, however, were still those of a studio artist, capitalizing on accidents and deploying found materials to create new types of physical gestures, be they expressionistic or geometric. He would not only utilize what he cut out, but also what was left over from the cutting.

In fact, he would ultimately construct his paintings equally from what was on the studio floor as from intended shapes developed from drawings. This form of recyclable collage/construction continued in all the

high-relief paintings that followed. The planar aspects of the Polish Village series continued to be explored in the mid-1970s, but cut into thinner, sleeker wedges that readdressed the concept of geometry as dynamic form.

Some of these gestures would appear to virtually fly off the wall—and, perhaps not coincidentally, the works themselves would be titled after birds, beginning with the Brazilian Bird series (1974–75). Fanning out from the picture plane in the manner of a deck of cards, the sleek, radical triangles even take on a winglike quality.

The surfaces of the ground and some of the shapes are etched with circular, gestural marks that reveal the hard metal beneath, and at the same time create the blurred illusion of vibrating planes or geometric feathers.

Stella had become interested in bird watching through his wife-to-be, Harriet McGurk, and he was particularly struck during a visit to the Florida Everglades, where the birds both stood out and blended into their environment, like colored gestures in an abstract field: “They were like impressionistic gestures that came in and out of focus in the space of the landscape.”

Clearly, these paintings are not representational in the usual sense, but they allow abstraction to absorb glimpses of the world, not to the point of making it representational, but certainly allusional. This would not be the last time that Stella would relate abstraction to personal experiences and observations outside the realm of painting. In the Exotic Bird Paintings (1976– 80), Stella experimented intently on focal depth, employing a far greater range of gestures. In 1975, he had purchased a set of commercial templates used for technical and mechanical drawings in the fields of boat building, railroad track construction, and architecture.

These ship curves, railroad curves, and French curves (which he had been collecting for some time), were utilized in the preparatory drawings for the series. For the completed paintings, these shapes were cut out, suspended in a picture-like rectangle, and combined with hand-painted and hand-etched markings. Stella combines a lexicon of abstract gestures—geometric, expressionistic, primitive scratches, and graffiti-like scrawls—that compete for our attention, stirring up the space inside, in front of, and around the floating rectangular frame, confusing our depth of vision.

In the same decade, Roy Lichtenstein’s graphic images of brushstrokes composed of benday dots and Gerhard Richter’s photographs of abstract painted gestures are like stop-action snapshots of spontaneous marks, frozen elegies of a bygone expressionism. Stella’s Exotic Birds, by contrast, are not static or melancholic.

They are not about the end of expressionism, but an

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attempt to activate it. Like Dr. Frankenstein, Stella took the parts of various abstract movements to create a new type of abstract picture. This gestural mélange, layered in front of a proscenium-like metal frame, resulted in a form of abstract, pictorial theater. The stabilizing modernist grid, a key reference in Minimalist art, is dispensed with, imparting an animated effect to the space, a puppet show of hanging abstract gestures swinging around the space, connected but independent at the same time. In fact, one of the fundamental characteristics in the development of Stella’s images over the years is a process of identifying pictorial conventions and then dismantling them—taking gesture, picture plane, and space apart so that the work appears on the verge of instability and in a state of flux.

The analogy to flight is literal, as many of the gestures have become disengaged from the ground, invisibly connected to an interior support, but appearing to hover in front of the painting, begging the question of just how far the pictorial can be extended before it becomes relief sculpture. At the time, Stella himself was not quite sure what they were. In 1977, he remarked, “I think of them as paintings. I know they are reliefs. . . .

I see them more as paintings because they are really meant to be seen head-on.”31 Actually, because Stella builds physical depth as much as he works laterally, one of the most interesting vantage points for these works is from the side, peeking behind the shallow beehive of suspended gestures. No one has ever made looking at a painting from the side more interesting.

The Indian Birds (1977–79) are even more densely layered, with a vocabulary of curved and twisted materials mixed with hand-drawing and painting.

These works evolved in stages, beginning with drawings and progressing to collages and maquettes, and finally metal fabrications. The density and accumulation of these different gestural signatures increased with the Circuit series (1980–84), the titles of which refer to automobile racing tracks. Stella’s attraction to speed is well-known among those who have driven with him any distance. It is known as well by the New York State Police, who have stopped him on numerous occasions. Stella has also been behind the wheel of Formula One race cars. The artist has said, “Car racing involves a particular kind of perception. The way you see line and space happens in very compressed frames of time. You experience line and space very quickly. A painting is a very compressed frame that you look at in time, but more slowly. However, you can make the painting speed up.” In Stella’s Circuits, gesture and space become superelastic, even hyper. The works are

31 Phenomenology of Frank

composed of slender, radically curved, and overlapping metal forms resembling hairpin turns that whip the eye around and into the depth of the painting. Their mixed and erratic curvatures suggest color and physical vibration, and a swirling movement draws our gaze into the layering of space like a vortex. In many respects, the Circuits are a gestural version of the previous decade’s Concentric Squares, seductively dizzying in their pictorial (but also more literal) spatial experience.

Working Space As early as the mid-1970s, painting was falling out of critical fashion, deemed by many members of a new generation of artists, influenced by more theoretically driven art historians and cultural theorists, to be increasingly outside avant-garde discourse, shoved to the side, as it were, by Minimalist sculpture, performance, and Conceptual Art. Artforum’s famous 1975 questionnaire to painters, asking whether they thought that painting “had outlived its usefulness to the current art scene,” summed up the moment.32 Abstract painters such as Robert Ryman and Brice Marden, who were developing their art with an eye toward painterly subtlety and nuance, were on small islands of their own. The Color Field painters who just preceded Stella’s generation—Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Louis, among others—whose work he much admired, had vaporized abstraction with their stained, atmospheric imagery.

Stella’s response was to continue to muscle painting back into the discussion. Steel and aluminum were now the artist’s go-to materials. The metallic particles of the Aluminum and Copper Paintings had now morphed into steel fragments, bursting out into the viewer’s space.

While his results ranged from the spectacular to the chaotic, Stella was making painting experimental again.

Marshalling a battery of different painting styles, unfashionable colors and surfaces, along with a raucous bricolage approach, Stella’s work of the 1970s and early 1980s inspired younger painters, from those associated with the Pattern and Decoration movement (crushed glass sprinkled over some of Stella’s surfaces looked like glitter to some)33 to the Neo-Expressionists. The ersatz character of Pattern and Decoration, as well as the overlaid assemblies of paintings by David Salle and Julian Schnabel, can be at least partly attributed to the physical presence of Stella’s work in those two decades.

In Schnabel’s words, “Frank opened painting up again.

He wasn’t afraid to pack things into painting. He was a veteran who gave you permission not just to paint, but

Fig. 11 Fernand Léger, Mechanical Elements, 1920. Oil on canvas, 36 1/8 × 23 1/2 in.

(91.8 × 59.7 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection, 1998 1999.363.36

12

Fig. 12 James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Crepuscule in Flesh Color and Green: Valparaiso, 1866. Oil on canvas, 23 1/8 × 29 7/8 in. (58.6 × 75.9 cm). Tate Gallery, London; presented by W. Graham Robertson 1940

11

to use whatever you wanted to use to paint. I’m sure I thought briefly about his Exotic Birds when I was making my plate paintings.”34 At the time, Stella’s paintings seemed to suggest that abstract painting was being held back by its timidity, both in terms of its materiality and its engagement with space.

In 1983, Stella was named the Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard University, where he delivered a series of six lectures entitled “Working Space.” The title could be interpreted in two ways: on the one hand referring to the space of his studios, which were becoming increasingly larger and filled with more and more disparate materials that he would recycle into paintings, and on the other to his ambition to extend the pictorial viewpoint of painting more deeply into a literal space, between the wall and the viewer. For the latter, he turned to the seemingly unrelated realm of Old Master painting, which had experienced its own turning point in regard to dramatic spatial effects. In his lectures and book of the same title, Stella examined the different types of spaces depicted in Renaissance and Baroque painting, pointing to Caravaggio’s paintings as an example of how bold foreshortening could illusionistically and dramatically activate the space between the painting and the viewer. Using Caravaggio’s projecting figures as a model, Stella intensified the gestural dimensionality of his own work while still maintaining vestiges of pictorial viewpoints, which is to say that most of his work remained wall-bound and generally rectangular, while physical expressionism was diving off the wall. Stella defined this pictorialism as “more than two dimensions but short of three, so, for

me, 2.7 is probably a very good place to be.”35 By the time of his Cones and Pillars series (1984–87), his paintings were probably closer to 2.8 or 2.9 on his spatial scale. With cascading three-dimensional elements, these works could be seen as an abstract homage to Caravaggio. Radiating lines, similar to those of his early Black Paintings, now act as modelling devices for the cones and cylinders that appear to be tumbling into the viewer’s lap.

Abstraction and Narrative Paul Cézanne’s famous assertion that a painter should organize, or abstract, nature into cylinders, spheres, and cones, was taken literally in Stella’s new series, but with a narrative twist.36 Rather than thinking of reduction as abstraction’s essential condition, Stella has been relentless in exploring how much new information he can load into abstraction. The Cones and Pillars imagery came about when the artist was working on a cycle of prints entitled Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s “Had Gadya” (1985; see Jordan Kantor, “Frank Painting,” figs. 4, 12, 13). The series was inspired by the Russian artist’s Had Gadya lithographs of 1919, based on the folk song sung following the Seder, the religious meal served in Jewish homes on the first or second night of Passover. As Stella described, “He [Lissitzky] attempted something few abstract painters have ever tried to do: address a narrative.” In these works, Lissitzky sought to address the potential marriage of Communism and Judaism through semifigurative and Cubistic

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Fig. 13 Frank Stella, Valparaiso Flesh and Green, 1963. Metallic paint on canvas, 6 ft. 6 in. x 11 ft. 3 in. x 3 in.

(2 x 3.4 x .1 m). Private collection

13

renderings of the whimsical, but blunt, “Had Gadya” text/song: “One little goat, one little goat . . . Then came a cat and ate the goat . . . Then came a dog and bit the cat that ate the goat . . . Then came a stick and beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat . . . Then came fire and burnt the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat,” and so on. The various components of the narrative have been interpreted as alluding to people and events in Jewish history, which is a grand series of destructions and re-creations. Stella saw it as analogous to the creative process.

While his early Minimalist works were schemat­ ically planned out through drawings and sketches, Stella’s method has evolved toward a process of manipulating many materials—making a form, tearing it up, and then using the destructions to create new forms.

The “Had Gadya” story reminded him not only of his own approach to art making, but of Johns’s well-known description of the creative process: “Take an object.

Do something to it. Do something else to it.”37 In his handling of the story, Stella also took note of how Lissitzky’s figures seem suspended in the space of the prints, similar to the figures of Lissitzky’s friend and fellow painter Marc Chagall. In Stella’s “Had Gadya” lithographs, illusionistic space and literal forms con­ tinually swallow each other up.

This interactive drama is expanded and made brazenly physical in the related Cones and Pillars series (1984–87), which takes the form of large-scale, high-­ relief paintings. Here, Stella invents his own narrative of abstract protagonists and threats—what the artist has called “a battle of forms fighting for position in the paintings.” Besides Cézanne, the main characters of these paintings—the cones and pillars—were inspired

33 Phenomenology of Frank

by a late nineteenth-century diagrammatic drawing in an architectural treatise on classical stone cutting.

Stella has transformed the classicism of these forms into an almost cartoon-like brawl as they bore deep illusionistic spaces into the wall or tumble out from it as flying objects. Made of lightweight aluminum, they are suspended in real space in front of the painting, as if animated by an invisible force. William Rubin compared the Cones and Pillars to Fernand Léger’s Mechanical Elements series (1918–23; fig. 11), while Rosenblum imagined them as akin to a freeze-frame of a cartoon explosion.38 In fact, they are a rigorously physical manifestation of both. Though Stella has never mentioned it, given his knowledge of early twentiethcentury Russian abstraction, it is also possible to see his Cones and Pillars series as a pictorial allusion to Tatlin’s famous model for the Monument to the Third International (1920), in which an open metal and spiraling framework held a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube—the entire semivertical structure leaning on a dynamic, asymmetrical axis.

To underscore his interest in simple but strong narratives, Stella titled the Cones and Pillars after a cycle of Italian folktales selected and retold by Italo Calvino in 1956. The poet recast the stories with the idea of making them more accessible to general readers.

The difference between Calvino’s tales and the originals is that his telling is very basic and less elaborate, just as Stella’s Cones and Pillars paintings are inhabited by simple, geometric, abstract forms. Since these paintings were named subsequent to their creation, the connections they each have to a given story are likewise very basic. Stella describes the correlation as follows: “They are simple and direct, the way a fairy tale is. They are

Fig. 14 Hollis Frampton, still from Nostalgia, 1971 Fig. 15 Frank Stella, dome of the Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto, 1992

14 15

active and have elements of fantasy. The construction of the space is believable and not believable.”

In the mid-1980s, Stella expanded this exploration of abstraction and narrative, now addressing an epic tale. He was inspired to reread Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) after visiting an aquarium with his two sons and being struck by the size, weight, and agility of the beluga whales. Melville’s legendary and graphic narrative of a ship captain’s quest for an enormous but elusive whale could easily be a metaphor for Stella’s own Ahab-like fixation on the nature and future of abstraction. Stella’s Moby-Dick series (1986–97) is epic in its own right. As the cycle was over twelve years in the making and consists of hundreds of works, each of which references one of the 135 chapters in Melville’s novel, it is difficult to ascertain exactly where the series begins and ends. In a few cases, cones and pillars are carried over from the previous series, but they are combined with even larger organic gestural forms.

The fact that the works in the cycle are named after specific chapters would suggest that the artist has directly illustrated the Melville story, and, indeed, one writer focuses on revealing the correspondences between Stella’s motifs and specific images in the series and their relation to passages in the novel.39 Approaching the series with this line of thought, one might see a relationship between Melville’s book and the work Stella has titled The Blanket (1988), referring to chapter 68 (plate 79). Here, Ishmael ponders the nature of a whale’s skin; there is a very thin, transparent layer that can be scraped off, under which are strange markings and lines, and then the thick layer of blubber that can be a foot thick. Ishmael wonders, how can one precisely define the skin of a whale? Likewise, Stella’s The Blanket is made of multiple layered and painted panels of metal that appear to be peeling apart. Given Stella’s career-

long interest in the physical boundaries of painting, it would not be a stretch to infer that Stella is asking similar questions about his medium: What is the skin of painting? How thick is it? How layered might it be?

In another example, Stella sets up a philosophical analogy in titling a work after the chapter Cetology, in which the narrator discusses the fact that, at the time, whales were difficult to describe, even biologically (e.g., are they fish or mammals?). Similarly, for Stella, who has continually stretched the boundaries of his medium, there is no adequate description of abstract painting in the late twentieth century.

Other writers, though, have asserted that it is unproductive to search for such connections.40 Indeed, as with the artist’s bird paintings, it is probably most accurate to describe the Moby-Dick series as “allusional,” deploying fragments of imagery and large, abstract gestures to evoke various chapters or scenes in the book: whale body parts, fish, seahorse heads, rainbows, harpoons, saws, bubbles. Stella also includes artistic debris that had accumulated in his studio over the previous decade, including parts of the Exotic and Indian Birds and the Cones and Pillars. Perhaps Stella is imagining the ocean as a metaphor for an immense, continually moving picture plane.

The visceral nature of Melville’s story plays to what Stella does best, allowing him to give free rein to his sense of dynamic physicality and gestural momentum, particularly in expressing the yawning presence of the sea. The ocean is felt in almost all the works from the series. The geometry so strongly present in previous series is re-formed into wave-like gestures that appear to rock and tilt on the wall, suggesting the weight and liquid mass that is the ocean. The surfaces of many of the Moby-Dick works vacillate between various blues and the gleaming white of sea foam. In a number of

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pieces, the image of the wave and the whale are combined to suggest their interrelated identities as massive, gestural forces. In Stella’s semiabstract retelling of Moby-Dick, the story becomes a metaphor for how modern paintings are constructed through the fundamental accumulation of liquid brushstrokes. A series of CAD (computer-aided design) drawings showing Stella’s variations on the wave/whale forms take on the appearance of schematic brushstrokes, the fundamental building blocks of any painting. At the same time, in the Moby-Dick works Stella finally entered the realm of freestanding sculpture with cast and poured steel assemblages, rusted from being kept outside, that rise from the floor like ghost ships being battered by ocean salt and time. Moving into the sphere of sculpture— both here and in other series such as the Çatal Hüyük cycle, named after neolithic sites in modern Turkey, and in large sculptural constructions titled after nuclear sites—Stella brought his expanded idea of painting into the medium of raw steel.

No painter of his time has been as open to exploring substitutes for paint as Stella. From the liquid of industrial paint composed of metal particles in the Aluminum and Copper series, the artist now creates his gestures by pouring pure, molten metal into thick conglomerations that appear both restless and frozen.

Many of these works seem not fully stopped but only paused in the midst of some ongoing process of violent deformation that threatens to resume at any moment.

They constitute a viscous form of Abstract Expressionism, as if a Pollock drip painting were rising up from the floor or off the wall. Yet, while Pollock had used aluminum paint to create works that suggest celestial webs, Stella uses the metal to create what look like grounded meteorites. Neither painting nor sculpture, these metal constructions are in many cases three-­ dimensional murals packed with a history of Stella’s studio debris pushed into a raucous compositional form and held together amid the poured metal, an assemblage embedded in a painterly surface.

In its relationship to reality, modernist painting has been a measured balance between evoking space (real or fictional/pictorial) and material tactility. Moving between the wall and the floor, Stella unsettles, or at least complicates, that balance, challenging us to situate our points of view as we figure out how his materials puncture and animate the space we share with the work. Revealingly, Stella often continues to describe his freestanding, or nearly freestanding, works in terms related more to painting than sculpture, arguing that most sculpture is read as a series of

35 Phenomenology of Frank

pictorial events. “I think it is natural to want to look into a sculpture the way you look into a painting,” Stella has said. In his multidimensional works, Stella offers us the possibility to do both.

Whether some of Stella’s works are paintings or sculptures is, at the end of the day, a moot point.

How­ever, what this dicing of categories indicates is the artist’s need to make objects that incorporate both pictorial and literal space. Stella is not above cheating to keep his hybrid viewpoints in tack. This is most obvious in the works appropriately titled “Easel Paintings,” composed of large, three-dimensional steel constructions, in which Stella has inserted steel plates that invariably read as picture planes. In other cases, such as the Bali series (2002–9), this floating picture plane appears utterly malleable, as if it were twisting in the wind. Here, the ostensive painting ground becomes the gesture, not unlike the early Running V series, but without the strictness of geometry. Appearing to react to gusts of air, the cast, sail-like forms of the Bali works seemingly glide out from the wall. Stella has acknowledged his interest in sails, which he has described as “the first unstretched canvases.” In 1963, he made a series of geometric line paintings, known as the Dartmouth series. One of these Dartmouth works was named for a James McNeill Whistler painting of sailing ships of different shapes and states of engagement with the wind (figs. 12–13).41 It is clear that since some of his earliest works, Stella has refused to see painting’s ground as a static, strictly wall-bound panel, but, rather, an expressive entity that operates in open space, as well as against the wall as a vague picture plane.

“Virtual Space Has No Ground” The Moby-Dick series began with a wave- or swell-like form used in a print in Stella’s Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s “Had Gadya.” He picked up on the motif from Lissitzky’s fifth plate, Then came a fire and burnt the stick, but Stella morphed the fire image into a wave.

What both flame and wave have in common is their mutability and their ambiguous relationship to space.

Both are continually changing gestural forms in perpetual movement. For years, Stella, a committed cigar smoker for most of his life, has been fascinated by the atmospheric gestures of smoke rings, which have shown up in drawings, photographs, prints, paintings, and sculptures. In a still from his 1971 film Nostalgia, Hollis Frampton documents Stella blowing an exceedingly long smoke ring two feet from his face, with a

Fig. 16 Wassily Kandinsky, Farbige Linien, 1924. Watercolor and Indian ink on paper on cardboard, 11 7/8 × 18 in.

(30.2 × 45.7 cm). Private collection, Courtesy Galerie Thomas, Munich, 2014 Fig. 17 Frank Stella, K.17 (lattice variation) protogen RPT (full-size), 2008.

Protogen RPT with stainless steel tubing, 12 ft. × 14 ft. 7 1/2 in. × 7 ft.

(3.7 × 4.5 × 2.1 m). Private collection

16

17

long smoke tail leading back to his mouth—a Jackson Pollock made of smoke, as one might imagine paint flying through the air from Pollock’s turkey baster (one of the tools he used to propel his medium) and landing on his floor-bound canvases (fig. 14). For decades, Stella casually analyzed how smoke rings operate in space, admiring their gestural elegance. He explains: “A smoke ring is a gesture that is intrinsically a part of space, integrated into it. It doesn’t sit in front of space and it isn’t in the background. It’s like a molecular part of it.

I’ve always wished I could do that with a painted gesture.”

In the late 1980s, the artist began studying smoke rings more rigorously—how they form, move, and bifurcate, splitting and producing new rings in space.

In 1990, his assistants set up an eight-foot-square box enclosed on all sides, lit with four lightbulbs and outfitted with cameras on the sides, top, and bottom. As Stella blew smoke rings through a small hole in the box, the six synchronized cameras captured them from every angle. The photographs were then fed into 3-D computer imaging programs like Illustrator and Photoshop, which created outlines of the smoke rings and diagram-

matic renderings that mapped the forms in a simulation of three-dimensional space. These CAD simulations, which have been utilized for all the major series from the early 1990s to the present, allowed the artist to more fully see how the forms were integrated into space.

As Stella puts it, “Virtual space has no ground. That’s the beauty of it. It’s about destroying the ground so you can explore all the dimensions and viewpoints.” By creating 3-D computer maps, often deconstructing and recombining them into new compositions—Matisse’s concept of the cut-out has now been computerized and objectified—Stella has been able to build sleek constructions that can truly be read both two- and three-­ dimensionally. A 3-D printer builds an image in thin layers, not unlike how a painting is produced, but literally in space. Combining lightweight aluminum “lines” and curved plastic planes made from this process, Stella can create orbital compositions that “float” in space while anchored to both the wall and the floor, the prescribed surfaces of both painting and sculpture.

CAD programs are now a requisite tool of architects, and, given the spatial trajectory of Stella’s paintings into

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sculptures, it is not surprising that he would eventually engage architecture in a more inclusive way. The artist’s project for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto, designed by the architect Peter Smith of Lett/Smith in 1992, did not just approach architecture as a physical support for paintings, but turned architecture itself into a pictorial experience. As he had asserted that most sculpture is read as a series of pictorial events, Stella argues that, even as architecture encloses space literally rather than illusionistically, it, too, is a series of moment-by-moment “pictures,” utilizing the focused tunneling directed in painting. In this theatrical container, materiality and illusionism mix in a mind-bending series of phantasmagoric landscapes.

The abstract and semiabstract forms that make up these murals were the beginnings of what Stella would later call “Imaginary Landscapes” (1994–2004), with titles based on Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi’s book Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980), which consolidates the most famous fantasy landscapes in literature: Shangri-La, L. Frank Baum’s Oz, Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland, C. S. Lewis’s Narnia, the landscapes of Jonathan Swift and J. R. R. Tolkien, and Thomas Moore’s Utopia, among others. The book appealed to Stella’s interest in the fantasy aspect of utopian abstraction as invented “space-scapes.” As he describes, “One of the best things that abstraction can do is that it allows you to create a fantasy space, not just a neutral one. Ultimately, you want to imagine yourself flying through the space or at least being pulled.”

Stella’s imagery animates the theater’s 10,000square-foot, multistoried space with painted reliefs and flat, illusionistic murals. The process for many of the murals, such as those in the lobbies and stairwells, began with cut-out printed paper images (smoke rings, color dots from printing processes, forms deconstructed from maquettes on computer programs, bubbles). He then assembled the collage on panels in such a way that some of the images projected or receded intermittently, creating shadows. The collage was then photographed, and the transparencies were used to print the images on canvas in a trompe l’oeil style so that the final product looks like a high-relief construction, although it is actually a flat, super-illusionistic painting—the illusionistic shadows from the original collage especially confuse our reading of the space in which the images are depicted. Circling around the walls and balconies, the abstract and semiabstract imagery creates a swirling space that concludes in the theater’s dome (fig. 15), where Stella has made a design based on the form of the smoke ring (the dome was actually hand-painted

37 Phenomenology of Frank

by assistants on plaster). Knowing that music would be a part of the theatrical program, Stella explained, “I wanted images that resonated like music resonates through space.”

The type of relationship between gesture and space that Stella was now exploring was in many ways more characteristic of music than painting. Stella’s Scarlatti K series (begun 2006), inspired by the sonatas of the Baroque harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757), resurrects one of the early themes in the history of abstraction: the close correlation between abstract painting and music. While Wassily Kandinsky argued in the early twentieth century that abstract painting can intuitively elicit the same emotional responses as music, Stella’s approach is more phenomenologically attuned (figs. 16–17). One of the characteristics of sound is that it is perceived as ambient, existing in and moving through space. While sound may be directional in origin, it can be perceived no matter what direction the listener faces, although the listener’s movement through space can affect the quality and nature of the sound. In his Scarlatti K series, Stella has essentially made multidirectional paintings that appear to move in space, using materialized, curving lines and swirling planes that are barely connected to the wall. Our gaze continually enters, moves around in, and exits what could be thought of as an orbiting galaxy of color, line, and plane.

These odd, three-footed paintings that touch both the wall and the floor disrupt the way we usually receive paintings, sculptures, and reliefs. They literally have their feet in all camps, stretching out into space in every direction. It is impossible to fully view these Scarlatti K works from a sustained, fixed position. As we walk around the apparently floating forms to follow the lines, shadows appear, creating new configurations and spatial relationships. If there is a ground to these works, it is transparent and ambient, a literal version of Kandinsky’s late geometric abstractions in which lines and planes appear to move in multiple directions in what seems to be an infinite, amorphous space. Stella makes Kandinsky’s fictional space real, as his lines and planes explode from the wall. Ironically, while the radical frontal projection of Stella’s works pushes us into the center of the room, they also lure us back to the wall as we attempt to experience the work from the vantage point of the presumed picture plane. From this view, looking out from the wall at an angle and into the space of the room, Stella’s early contention that gesture makes space becomes crystal clear as his forms reach out to grab the space of the room.

Pure Feeling and Pure Play: For Malevich Throughout Stella’s career, he has never completely jettisoned the concept of the picture plane; rather, his work as a whole can be seen as an exploration of how to continuously re-form its relationship between the wall and the viewer. From the wall and the floor, the twisting forms of the Scarlatti K series eventually found their way to large tabletops, horizontal picture planes suspended in open space. Circus of Pure Feeling for Malevich (2009) is made of wooden tables with small, gestural, unpainted constructions sitting atop each one (plate 92). The title refers to the Russian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich, in particular his canonical painting White on White (1918) and his emotion-centered definition of abstraction. Malevich wrote, “Under Suprematism, I understand the supremacy of pure feeling in creative art. To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are, in themselves, meaningless; the significant thing is feeling.”42 While the spatial ambiguities of White on White would surely appeal to Stella, Malevich’s emotion-based conception of abstraction would be less relevant for the artist, for whom pure feeling is replaced by pure seeing. “What you see is what you see” has always been Stella’s guiding principle, but he now acknowledges the whimsical aspects of seeing. Both the “circus” in the title and the light and energetic qualities of the hand-sized coiling forms allude to Alexander Calder’s famous Circus (1926–31), in which Calder twisted wires into small circus performers on a large, table-like platform.

In Circus of Pure Feeling, Stella thus pays homage to two great, but very different pioneers of abstraction, and, by implication, two sides of his own aesthetic— essentially, a bracketing of Stella’s long career. The monochrome nature of the piece and the simple, square plywood boards suggest the purity of Malevich as much as the simple, pedestrian character of Stella’s early Minimalist work. (Or, even earlier, could these tables be a magnified echo of the table shape in the artist’s 1957 abstraction discussed at the beginning of the essay, and the twisting, curved forms a reverie of the thick, curving brushstrokes in that early painting?) However, the steel constructions now have a lighthearted gesturalism that reflects the exuberance of Calder’s Circus and the more gestural work Stella now makes. Like Calder’s circus troupes, Stella’s tabletop sculptures “perform” in space on a horizontal picture plane that is both table and stage. Calder, who invented the kinetic constructions known as “mobiles” and “stabiles,” would no

doubt appreciate the multiple spatial possibilities of Circus of Pure Feeling, as the tabletop could be conceived as an immense landscape where scale plays tricks. It is easy to imagine the coiling forms much larger, as though viewers are miniature bodies looking up at monumental sculptures.

As if anticipating the question, where would Stella’s “paintings” go next?, the artist floats his gestural forms in the epicenter of space between the walls, ceiling, and floor. In the earlier Irregular Polygons, Stella loaded Malevich’s dynamic triangle into various planes that appeared as if they were about to be launched into space.

In two recent works of lightweight plastic, large, white spiraling planes hang from the ceiling, a vortex-like merger of Calder’s mobiles and Malevich’s white-onwhite purity (see plate 95). These works dominate their architectural environments, while, at the same time, their curved planes enclose a space within the space.

Stella sees them as both hanging paintings and freehanging sculpture. He no longer argues about distinctions between the media, simply asserting that it has all come out of his pictorial beginnings.

The chronological distance between these recent works and Untitled (1957) is nearly sixty years. Although the works are very different in their materiality, the relationship they explore between gesture and space is remarkably consistent, a testament to the fact that the distinction between pictoriality and phenomenology can be a gray area—what in Stella’s case has been called a “personalization of phenomenology.”43 His long-standing identification with Minimalism notwithstanding, the history of Stella’s installations and his art indicates that he fills whatever space he is given with the materiality of what he thinks of as painting.

Today, these paintings/constructions have an almost Leviathan-like quality. Many of us argue that art needs space to breathe. Stella counters that if it is space you want, “materiality and gesture make space.” It is this continual materializing of space that is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Stella’s art. From the Black Paintings to the present work, Stella has consistently, emphatically, and creatively considered the relationship between materiality, illusionistic space, and three-dimensional space. Aesthetically, his bodies of work may be radically divergent, reflecting several of the major movements in postwar art, but they all exemplify the artist’s evolving theories and investigations into the possibilities for abstraction. Variously clearing it out to focus on singular aspects and infusing it with previously unthinkable additions such as narra­tive, Stella’s art provokes a unique phenomenolog-

Michael Auping

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ical experience for the viewer. The trajectory of an artist’s career does not often take the form of an arc, but, rather, a meandering, circuitous path marked by differing objects that make up a family. As in all families, some bear a close resemblance, while others appear as outliers. What ties them together, their visual DNA, as it were, is not a look or style, but a particular way of seeing. In Stella’s case, it is about seeing literal space through and around materiality. The irony is that those of us who have always viewed him as a “Minimalist” may have misunderstood the narrative his early works put in place.

— 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from the author’s interviews with Frank Stella conducted between October 1, 2009, and August 2014 at the artist’s homes and studio.

2. Frank Stella, “The Pratt Lecture,” New York, winter 1960; the lecture is reprinted in the present volume.

3. Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 14.

4. For a comprehensive discussion of the Black Paintings, see Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976).

5. Walter Darby Bannard, in a telephone conversation with the author, June 16, 2014.

6. Lawrence Alloway, in a series of interviews with the author by telephone and in New York, June 1986–September 1988. The interviews were conducted in preparation for two major exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and their accompanying publications: Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, 1987, and Abstraction, Geometry, Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America since 1945, 1989.

7. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 94.

8. Robert Irwin, in telephone conversations with the author between January 27 and February 15, 2010.

9. Frank Stella with Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, “New Nihilism or New Art?,” radio interview by Bruce Glaser, WBAI-FM (New York), broadcast March 24, 1964. Transcript published in “Questions to Stella and Judd,” ed. Lucy R. Lippard, Artnews 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 55–61.

10. Clement Greenberg, Post-Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964). The catalogue accompanied an exhibition curated by Greenberg that included three works by Stella from the Aluminum and Purple series.

11. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44; “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20–23.

12. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 15.

13. Frank Stella, “Grimm’s Ecstasy” (1991), in Bonnie Clearwater, Frank Stella at Two Thousand: Changing the Rules (North Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2000), 68.

14. The Purple Painting titles refer to Carl Andre, Leo Castelli, Emile de Antonio (“D”), Hollis Frampton, Henry Geldzahler (“Garden”), Sidney Guberman, Ileana Sonnabend, and Charlotte Tokayer. Guberman, Frank Stella, 75.

15. Brian O’Doherty, “Frank Stella and a Crisis of Nothingness,” New York Times, January 19, 1964.

16. Sol LeWitt, in an interview with the author, Fort Worth, October 12, 1994.

17. Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 36.

18. Stella, “New Nihilism or New Art?” 19. Ad Reinhardt, quoted in Margit Rowell, “Ad Reinhardt: Style as Recurrence,” in Ad Reinhardt and Color (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1980), 23.

20. El Lissitzky, “The Film of El’s Life” (1928), in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1967), 325.

39 Phenomenology of Frank

21. William Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 8.

22. John Baldessari, in a telephone conversation with the author, May 2011.

23. Lawrence Weiner, in an interview with the author, Fort Worth, October 12, 2010.

24. For an in-depth discussion of Stella’s relationship to the decorative, see Markus Brüderlin, “Frank Stella and Ornament,” in Frank Stella: The Retrospective; Works, 1958–2012 (Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2012), 98–125.

25. Frank Stella, quoted in William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 149.

26. Frank Stella, “Art in Western Christendom,” an essay submitted to the Department of History, Princeton University, in partial fulfillment of the degree of bachelor of arts, 1958.

27. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 51.

28. Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 180.

29. Henri Matisse, Jazz (Paris, 1947), 73–74, trans. in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 172.

30. Frank Gehry, in conversation with the author, Dallas, January 16, 1999.

31. Frank Stella, “Frank Stella Talks about His Recent Work,” interview by Juliet Steyn, Art Monthly 7 (May 1977): 13.

32. The Artforum questionnaire was written by Robert Pincus-Witten.

Responses from painters were published in “Painter’s Reply . . . ,” Artforum 14, no. 1 (September 1975): 26–36.

33. During the 1980s, the collector and art dealer Holly Solomon championed the Pattern and Decoration movement, which freely mixed decorative patterns (found and invented) with expressionistic gesture, using a wide range of disparate materials. Solomon often pointed to Stella’s Exotic and Indian Birds series as leading the way for the younger generation of artists that she represented. In fact, she took the author to attend one of Stella’s Harvard lectures.

34. Julian Schnabel, in conversation with the author, Fort Worth, November 6, 2014.

35. Frank Stella, in Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987, 77.

36. Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 163–64.

37. Jasper Johns, “Sketchbook Notes,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 192.

38. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987, 144; Robert Rosenblum, letter to the author, April 19, 1987.

39. For a chart listing the correlations between the various groups of the series and the individual chapters of the novel, see Robert K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes (New York: Blue Heron Press, 2006), 39.

40. Philip Leider, “Shakespearean Fish,” Art in America 78, no. 2 (October 1990): 172–91.

41. Christian Geelhaar, Frank Stella: Working Drawings/Zeichnungen, 1956–1970 (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1980), 84.

42. Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003), 67.

43. Robert Hobbs, “Frank Stella: Matrixed and Real Space,” Frank Stella: Recent Work (Philadelphia: Locks Gallery, 2000), 10.