My Favorite Artist This Year
Frank Stella
I was never a big fan of Frank Stella. Not, not a fan, just well, I never really got what he was doing. When I was young and in college, studying art history, my great teacher, Charles Moone, gave a rather cursory overview of him while teaching a course on Pop art. I remembered the images: Geometric, square, black, minimalist. These paintings were reticent. OK, but, I thought, so, I’d rather look at Jasper or Rauschenberg. They seemed to be making more interesting things…although not really Pop. Of course, Stella wasn’t either, but that’s another story.
Later, when I was living in Los Angeles, there was an enormous Frank Stella construction hanging off the wall. It was, St. Michael’s Counterguard. It was still geometric, but beyond that, any association with the Stella paintings with which I was familiar was pure fantasy. This was a massive concoction of printed metal. It was a multi-planed, polished metal, multi-dimensional positive/negative rolling protuberant extravaganza, and it really imposed itself on you. I ducked away from it dashing away anxiously to see something else - maybe the Motherwell show.
This year, while I was making my little relief sculptures, 40 years later, I happened to see a video of the installation of a Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney, and with that, I was off to the races (which for any Stella insiders would agree is a pun that Frank would appreciate).
It’s not exactly an understatement, or a mis-statement, as I’ve come to know the artwork of Frank Stella, to describe it as anything less than, or more than, what it is: ecstatically exemplary. The great ones, Picasso, Cezanne, DeKooning, were like that.
They did it. For 50, or 60, or 70 years, they did it, and they kept doing it with curiosity and boldness. They kept finding ways to be fearless. Kept finding ways to make pictures along the way that are so goddam illuminating that they nearly knock you out. I’m thinking here of the first 6x8 feet Las Meninas that Picasso did in two days. Ridiculous, of course, and just the start of a project of variations on the Velasquez painting that Pablo did because, as he said, “It’s always a search.” As a practicing artist, this is all you can want or hope to find in another artist - or to do, or find in yourself.
Frank Stella searches. He gets out of his own way and he’s brave. He was always knowledgeable about art and its history, articulate and thoughtful, even as a kid. That’s what his early paintings were about: thinking of painting in a new way - kind of inside out. Here’s what I mean, Stella used some of the mechanics and tendencies of the Abstract Expressionists and sort of made (as those early black paintings exposed the negative space by giving it formal dominance in the canvases), the positive action a negative expression. Then he used that pattern of thinking about painting and applied it to the concept of motion, with the later Polish Village paintings, by not expressing it, but by suggesting it. Pulling in. Pulling in. Always pulling in.
But then, as I see it, there was an alchemical reaction. The strict formality of his paintings had their own ideas and eventually, slowly evolving, became the obverse of Stella’s original imagery. And like an exotic bird released, this freedom has allowed his work to grow and mutate and to develop more complexity, and ambiguity than he ever could have conceived.
Stella used to be adamant that his work was painting regardless of how little it came to resemble a painting. But as the shapes bent and twisted, and as the paint was used to paint bent and twisted pieces, not a canvas, and as the shapes pulled off the wall or stood partially on the ground, Stella has conceded, I think, that these are something but not paintings. That’s why Frank Stella is my artist of the year.
He started by making art inside out, and I think now his art has made him inside out. He was brave, and is still brave. But his once tiny studio that had just enough room for him to pour his paint and mask his canvas, has given way to Team Stella. His now massive installations require a team of talent to help him imagine and execute his searching. Surprising even himself still, I’m sure, with the paintings or reliefs or sculptures he continues to make.
Whatever you call them.