Connections

Frank Stella: Connections (ed.), exh cat., Hatje Cantz, 2011

Let us begin by briefly considering three paintings. The first, painted in 1958, is a large rectangular canvas covered from top to bottom in a field of thickly painted broad horizontal stripes of alternating deep burgundy and rich yellow. The stripes set up an optical charge of shimmering undulating movement in which the darker red stripes appear to move both forward, advancing into a space in front of the yellow, and backwards, retreating so that the yellow occupies the foreground. At the same time there is a lateral movement zipping across the painting along the stripes, from one side to another. At the approximate centre of the painting sits a dark rectangular shape, its top and bottom edges aligned with the top and bottom edges of two of the red stripes. The shape appears both as an object that sits in front of the field of stripes, and as an aperture set into the surface of the canvas, an open box, a gate or doorway.  Moreover, due to the way it interacts with the stripes and its off-centre positioning, it appears somewhat unstable. A seemingly simple composition is therefore revealed to unleash a surprisingly complex array of spatial and optical considerations.

The second painting was made in 1977 and consists of a rectangular canvas forming a double square. Within the painting each equal quadrangle comprises a series of concentric iterations, which appear either as smaller squares superimposed on larger (as the steps of a pyramid) or as a series of flat concentric stripes. The colours are intense, uniform and flat and uninflected, the handling cool, the composition an essay in a kind of logic.  In the square on the left the progressive bands alternate a quasi-spectrum, moving from outside to centre, from red, through orange, to green and so on, with a sequence of reddish pinks, getting progressively darker from inside out. In the right hand square the sequencing is reversed. Within each concentric square, and across the whole canvas, the coloured progressions interrupt and disrupt each other, creating a sense of chromatic intensity as well as a shallow space that pulses backwards and forwards. The overall impression is of shimmering warmth and heat.

The third painting might just as well be described as a relief (as it rests against and projects out from a wall) or a sculpture (as the viewer can pass around and behind it). In it a sequence of whirling coloured forms constructed in the synthetic polymer Protogen RPT mass around a central dark circular form, a focal point suggestive both of a flat and solid disc or of an entry point or hollow space, and are held in place by an armature of looping steel tubes. The whole is redolent of whirling movement held only just in balance or equilibrium. There is colour, but it is not painted colour, having the synthetic feel of the mechanically applied high and glossy tones of automobile body work or plastic toys. Yet, despite this, the whole is an organic and sensual construction, a complex optical and sensory experience.

These three very different  works, Grape Island (1958), Red Scramble (1977) and K.37 Lattice Variation (2008), might at first appear to be the work of three radically different artists but are of course all by one: Frank Stella. It has often been written that Stella has had two distinct careers, the first as a Minimalist and the second as an exuberant ‘maximalist’, making what Robert Rosenblum described as a shift ‘from monkish austerity to juke-box extravaganza’ in the mid-1970s.[1]  In fact, while Stella’s careers have embraced an extraordinary number of formal innovations and radical shifts in style there is an underlying consistency to his concerns. For example, the three works described above, while very different in register, so completely variant in feel and method, all demonstrate an engagement with structure, linear organization, centrality, space, colour and the illusion and materiality of painting. They are very different, of course, but they represent branches of the same family. Stella himself has said as much, remarking in 1987:

‘I think one’s understanding of structure, one’s sense of the relationship between things, remains largely the same. I think you’re born with a particular sense of structure and you can’t really change it. My sense of how things go together, of what constitutes equilibrium, stays the same – as, for example, the way I put things edge to edge, point to point. If you look carefully at work as different as the Exotic Birds and the Running V stripe pictures, you’ll see that the V’s relate edge-to-edge and point-to-point in a similar way. Although it looks very different, it’s the same sensibility.’[2]

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It is almost 50 years since Frank Stella first exhibited in London and just over 40 years since his first (and last) substantial museum show here.[3] That exhibition, at the Hayward Gallery in 1970, was a travelling version of the artist’s first retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Stella was just 34 years old and the exhibition included work from just 12 years, yet the astonishing richness and variety was indicative of the restless nature of Stella’s creative endeavour.  There were paintings from the Black, Aluminium, Copper, Purple, Moroccan, Persian, Notched V, Irregular Polygon and Protractor series. In the catalogue the painter John McLean wrote that the exhibition displayed ‘an amazing fecundity: a continual searching, back-tracking, and re-routing about an idea of painting as an almost architectural presence.’[4] McLean’s words are as applicable to Stella’s practice now, in 2011, as they were in 1970.

Since the Hayward Gallery exhibition Stella has exhibited regularly in Europe and has had a number of smaller gallery shows in London. Yet while he has had substantial museum exhibitions at European museums as varied as the Stedelijk Amsterdam (1987), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1987), Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart (1988), Reina Sofia, Madrid (1995) and the Haus Der Kunst, Munich (1996), he has not been shown in depth in the UK since 1985 when he exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. This means that Stella’s work, particularly of the later phase, is not as well known here as it perhaps should be. This, taken together with the fact that apart from Tate’s holdings of four paintings plus a group of prints, the only major pieces in a public collection in the UK are the small group in the Heyer Bequest at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery, means that a critical and popular lacunae exists in Britain as far as this very important artist goes.

With this in mind, rather than attempt a comprehensive or definitive reading of Stella’s achievement, Connections proposes a thematic and formal reading of his development, including significant examples of work from some but not all phases of Stella’s career. The works have been brought together in broad thematic groupings which explore the artist’s formal concerns: with plane, space and relief, colour and movement. Taken as a whole, they propose a radical explosion of the possibilities of painting, sculpture and architecture.

For all its extraordinary diversity, all Stella’s work stems from a simple proposition, framed so succinctly in the seminal lecture given at the Pratt Institute in the winter of 1959:

‘There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.’[5]

Frank Stella: Connections aims to track the ways in which Stella has addressed these parallel problems of learning and making.

[1] Robert Rosenblum, ‘Introduction’ in Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella Paintings 1958 to 1965, Stewart, Tabori & Chang, New York, p.10.

[2] Quoted in William Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, MoMA, New York, p.79

[3] Stella’s first show in London was at the Kasmin Gallery in 1964

[4] John McLean, ‘Introduction’ in Frank Stella, exh cat, Hayward Gallery, London

[5] Frank Stella, Pratt Lecture, 1960