At this point, you’ve likely been inundated with articles about the Whitney Museum’s Frank Stella show, the museum’s first retrospective in it’s new Meatpacking location. While Stella is one of the most analyzed artists of our time, the approachable nature of his work has also allowed for him to be one of the most influential. The New Yorker described his wide reach perfectly in saying “His impact on abstract art was something like Dylan’s on music and Warhol’s on more or less everything.”
Tackling an artist’s entire body of work is difficult – particularly when the artist has a career that stretches over six decades, and even more so when the artist rapidly reinvents their style outside of the popular art movements of the time.
Stella’s retrospective consists of roughly 120 pieces that takes over the entire fifth floor of the museum and even spills over onto the same-floor picturesque outdoor deck. The show’s curator Michael Auping has organized the expansive collection quasi-chronologically starting with Stella’s early works leading you into the ambitious works of the present. The best way to digest the show is to consider the works in their perspective series and always keep in mind Stella’s maxim, “what you see is what you see.”
PRELUDE
The two most fore-front works are the purest examples of Stella’s wide-spectrummed career. The left side of the ceiling-high white wall displays the appropriately named painting, Pratfall (1974) – which exudes the premature, minimalist state of Stella’s flourishing oeuvre. The smokey black and white-lined canvas hangs in sharp contrast next to the 40-foot long clusterfuck painting, Das Erdbeben in Chili [N#3](Earthquake in Chile) (1999). If you don’t know anything about Frank Stella’s long career, the first two abstracts on display should hint towards the fact that Stella was and is an extremely unpredictable artist.
BLACK PAINTINGS
Turning left will lead you to the well-known inky “Black Paintings” which were originally featured at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 during Stella’s senior year at Princeton. The first room, filled with these pinstriped, monochrome canvases are essentially the toddler-stage in the artist’s fifty-seven year career. Stella made headlines with his notorious, Die Fahne hoch! painting in ’59, which is titled after the Nazi Party marching anthem, “Horst Wessel Song”. Monochrome paintings are common place now, but at the time these paintings were revolutionary, aligning with works by Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt.
PROTRACTOR SERIES AND POLISH VILLAGE SERIES
Once Stella broke ground with the MoMA show, his work quickly progressed as his influences diversified and his style broke conceptualism conventions. The dark, monochrome canvases gradually became more maximal, with bigger dimensions and a highlighter inspired color palette, commonly referred to as the “Protractor Series”.
His works though the late 60s and early 70s, also known as the “Polish Village Series,” throw the viewer into an unbreakable state of wonderment through provocative color and scale. However, unlike his contemporaries that were fixated on conceptual work, their aesthetic isn’t meant to provoke any intellectual depth.
EXOTIC, INDIAN BIRD, CONES AND PILLARS, AND MOBY DICK SERIES
What you see next is something slightly reminiscent of a NASA satellite. Lined on the wall, Stella’s largest works are mounted with thick aluminum hooks and screws. Venturing away from Minimalism and into his Abstract Expressionism stage, this is when Stella’s work steers clear of any obvious theme or art historical reference.
However, there is still a transparent consistency with Stella’s relationship with shape as an ideal. From his earliest series, like “Shape and Form” and the “Protractor Series” to later collections like the “Moby Dick Series,” Stella continues to manipulate shape almost as a bloodline, simultaneously running through all of his work.
“What painting wants more than anything else is working space – space to grow with and expand into, pictorial space that is capable of direction and movement, pictorial space that encourages unlimited orientation and extension. Painting does not want to be confined by boundaries of edge and surface.” – Stella
Reading the information provided by the museum also teaches you that select works in the “Circuit Series” (1980-84), like Zeltweg (V), 4.75x, were inspired by Stella’s fascination with race car driving. This likely explains the fast-paced fluidity that is intertwined within these sculptures from the late 70s and early 80s.
The “Moby Dick Series” is the only body of work that is not curated into one section of the exhibit – instead it is spread out throughout the entire 5th floor. Most likely that is because of the sheer size of the works which were all inspired by a chapter of Herman Melville‘s novel, Moby Dick.
LATER WORKS (1990s-NOW)
By this point, you’re pretty deep into Stella’s body of work. This is when the artist progresses to his final series, “Imaginary Places” (1994-2004), the “Bali Series” (2002-2009), and “Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatric” (2006-now). Out of his “Heinrich von Kleist series” (1996-2008), an early 19th century German author, comes the grand sculpture, Raft of Medusa (Part I). Seated in front of the scenic view of the Hudson, the sculpture is absolutely intended to be observed from every angle (when standing from behind you can see right above eye-level, written on an aluminum bar in script, “SAVE STELLA”). The huge piece is directly inspired by French Romanticist, Théodore Géricault‘s version of Raft, reminding us of Stella’s rich historical background.
Then somehow Stella makes a quick transition back into his minimalist style, but in sculptural form in his “Scarlatti Sonata Series,” with works like K.81 combo (K.37 and K.43) large size (2009) and K.144 (2013). Influenced by Baroque harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti, Stella’s later works are intended to create a vision using form and shape (naturally), as a response to Scarlatti’s music.
By the end of the exhibit, the sheer scope of Stella’s creativity and talent is almost palpable. It’s worth turning around and admiring the collection from a backwards perspective at a distance. All of Stella’s works, from the minimalist paintings, to the wood works, to the large mental sculptures, can and should be appreciated close up and afar – seducing you with his lucid colors, alluring silhouettes, and miscellaneous materials.
Like this article? Check out Jim Shaw’s retrospective at the New Museum, or other great shows on view in New York.