Stella's Places
February 2008
As an art historian, I have had the honor of visiting the studio-residences of various artists. Among them was Georges Braque’s Auguste Perret–designed house in Paris, with an ordered sophistication akin to the artist’s work, and, just blocks away, Henri Matisse’s preserved 1916 studio on Quai Saint-Michel, surprisingly high above the Seine and overlooking the Notre Dame Cathedral. I have been to the “working” factory and sculpture fields of David Smith at Bolton Landing in upstate New York, and to Willem de Kooning’s 1950s Manhattan studio, unexpectedly evoking in its proportions and light the sense of being in an interior by Vermeer.Still, these and many others did not prepare me for entering Frank Stella’s enormous “country” studio in upstate New York last spring. Filled with huge constructions of differently shaped, sheets and tubes of aluminum, a first impression might be “Boeing.” Then, as Stella and I spent the day in this sports field–sized space, other responses came from the sheer density of materials, of works in different stages of realization and ranges of scale, such as a tabletop architectural model and an open sculpture construction big enough to encage a real cabin.
The “Boeing” description actually is not as far-fetched as it might initially appear to be. In 1912, Braque and Picasso, with their studios containing paper-and-string Cubist sculpture assemblies (a formal foreground for Stella’s great Polish Village reliefs), called each other “Wilbur” and “Orville,” in reference to the wings-and-wires constructions of the flying Wright brothers. And it is Picasso with whom Stella has been connected. Picasso dominated the 20th century until around 1960, with Stella’s body of work commanding attention for the next four decades. Interestingly, though, each artist created a landmark picture early, around the age of 25: Picasso (b. 1881), “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Stella (b. 1936), “Union Pacific.”
With the perspective of time and repeated experiences of the works of both artists, I posit that Stella’s achievements have exceeded those of the Cubist master. When he was in his 50s during the mid-1930s Picasso’s art had largely become a practice of “applied Cubism,” employing a vocabulary in a near-academic manner (indeed, soon taught in advanced art schools). By contrast, when Stella was the same age, he was only just beginning to fully explore complex compositions in works such as his “Cones and Pillars” series, his extraordinary commission for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto and especially his grand “Baroque” ceiling ring in that theatre.
Of course, innovation is not in itself a value or a virtue. It might be properly gathered with “novelty,” a characteristic of much contemporary art. But creative invention to expand the range of art’s power is important, and is a central aspect to understanding Stella’s oeuvre. However, this is easier said than done. Indeed, it is a telling measure of the richness of Stella’s work that the best writings about it have been highly focused, from early texts on paintings by Robert Rosenblum and Michael Fried, and William Rubin’s two catalogue discussions of paintings and then constructions, to recent considerations of sculpture by Bonnie Clearwater and of architectural designs by Paul Goldberger. Stella’s post-1970s drawings and his maquettes, along with his printmaking, are still only summarized (except for Robert Hughes on the “Swan Engravings”) and, more to the point, the very contrapuntal connections among these different works have yet to be explored.
Even if we define them as “episodic” in focus, three concurrent exhibitions of Stella’s art in New York last summer provided a rare occasion to gain a wider appreciation. And the range shown was also informative, from smaller-scale wall con-structions shown at Paul Kasmin Gallery to two exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Frank Stella on the Roof” showed his recent large-scale sculpture on the museum’s roof, while “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture” presented his architectural designs. In this second exhibition, curator Gary Tinterow included comparative works in other media by the artist—a virtually unique presentation of Stella’s wider work.
While the Kasmin exhibition’s selection presents an abstract combination of quite various elements, the sculptures’ roots lie in 18th-century European and English still-life relief modelings and carvings as well as in Cubist compositions by Jacques Lipchitz and Henri Laurens. For example, the resolution of “K-79” (2006) rests in its long, looping tube passing into and around a center, weighted core-composed of a heavy relief element in the upper area, countered by an open form embracing the tube at the lower right; the center element of “carved out” planes derives from a flatsheet push-out hat Stella found on a Rio beach. Most importantly, the works shown at Kasmin provided a lesson on scale in Stella’s art—where proportion is real, the pieces have no sense of being “studies” for enlargement. While this is perhaps a given in Stella’s large-size works, this “scale realism” has been true since his pioneering sculpture show at Knoedler in 1992.
At the other end of the physical scale, we find Stella’s architectural designs, as shown in models at the Metropolitan, including one project (unrealized) of particular note: The Chapel of the Holy Ghost. At first viewing, this design seems to be casual, even overly “sculptural,” consisting of only three basic, though functional, components: a cone form as the sanctuary with an open-air “nave” and crowning above; two open-band “swirls” (from the same concept used later in “K-79”), which also extend the flat aluminum gray bands of “Union Pacific” (1970) and his grand double square diptych, “Le Réve de d’Alembert” (1974).
In one understanding, Stella’s cone-sanctuary has historic connections: the Orthodox Church’s placing the Nativity in a cave and the Gospel texts’ account of the rock-cut tomb of Christ’s burial, an idea that may be found in Baroque pictures of pilgrimage churches, with services depicted within the cave. Regarding this, Stella has a continuing interest in the ritual functions of prehistoric cave paintings that began when he had a rare opportunity to see the Lascaux cave with his wife, Harriet, in 1999.
The great range and high accomplishments of Stella’s work (paintings, sculpture and architecture) and his clear writings on art and artists come from what we might term a “generosity from conviction”: The artist has continually engaged in finding and establishing how abstract art can articulate meaning. His works can be compared, in this sense, with both the complexities of Braque’s late, grand “Studios” and the sharp clarities of Matisse’s paper “cut-outs,” and especially their transformation in Matisse’s own architectural creation, the Chapelle du Rosaire in Vence, France. Matisse described this as “the achievement of an entire life’s work … difficult, sincere effort.” So, too, is Stella’s art—and with more to come.
E.A. Carmean Jr. is preparing a study of the religious projects of eight major modern artists, including Frank Stella. He contributed to the Met’s 2007 “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture” exhibition.
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