FRANK STELLA
Frank Stella (born 1936) revolutionised abstract painting when he burst into the centre of the New York avant-garde in 1959 with his Black Paintings. At this time the heyday of Abstract Expressionism had passed, and Stella’s pivotal Black Paintings were like a manifesto for a new kind of art, which was both his own highly individual abstract language and the founding blocks for the emergence of Minimalism in the early 1960s.
Stella reacted against the gestural brushwork of the Abstract Expressionists and wanted to capture the image without the suggestion of the artist’s touch and variation in stroke. He thus departed from the technique of drawing with the brush. His methodical, almost mathematical working procedures examined all possible permutations and combinations of a chosen theme in form and/or colour, producing glaring, rainbow-striped patterns and often using commercial household paint. One of Stella’s remarkable innovations was the shaped canvas, in which the literal format of the edges coincides with the format of the image contained within them. Stella thus emphasised the picture as object, rather than the picture as a representation of something in the physical or experiential world. He also renounced the long tradition of Cubism and replaced it with another, fresher kind of spatial construction that forced illusionistic space out of a painting by using a regulated pattern and symmetry and by enhancing the two-dimensionality of the canvas. His art provides a paragon of formalism. He famously said ‘What you see is what you see’.
Stella’s early interest in architecture led him to conceive pictorial space that could project forward rather than recede towards a single vanishing point. In particular Frank Lloyd Wright’s mitre-edged roofs and concentric square reliefs offered a way of translating architectural space into the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. The squares and bands in Stella’s paintings create visual ripples in space, which make the shapes optically recede or project like Wright’s roofs or reliefs. Since the 70s and 80s he has been creating three-dimensional collages and wall reliefs, which can be comprehended as paintings in literal space. These chaotic assemblages are the synthesis of his thoughts on painting, architecture and of a convincingly habitable ‘working space’. For Stella, it was important to expose the interior space of his sculptures, to look through and into the sculptural mass. The interior of the sculpture is also implied by the way that intricate forms weave and snake thorough the depth of the work and burst through the other side. Stella builds his sculptures by adding and subtracting materials, twisting and turning them until they achieve the right sense of movement and mass that defies gravity.
The sequence of development in Stella’s series of works is always apparent, yet he has constantly renewed his approach to painting with fresh ideas that are exciting and unpredictable. By the end of the 50s Stella contributed a highly original style to the already varied vocabulary of American art and forged one of the genuinely new paths for the continued development of non-figurative art in the 60s. He is the only living American artist to have been the subject of two retrospectives at MoMA, one in 1970 and the other in 1987.