Frank Stella, who died on Saturday at age 87, once joked that he harbored only one regret. We were sitting in his scruffy studio in the East Village, and he said he was sorry that he had failed to take legal action when the men’s wear store bearing his name opened in New York in the mid-70s. “People call here all the time asking for cashmere coats,” he said.
Stella, it can safely be said, was not a fashion plate. To the end of his life, he had the aura of a nervous whiz kid with oversize glasses and frizzy hair. He counted himself among the socially marginalized and once joked in a personal letter about “all us miscreants who drifted into the Bowery of Life, the art world.”
His great passion was abstract painting, and he began his career with a big bang. In 1959, at the advanced age of 23, he became famous overnight for his Black Paintings, with narrow stripes that extend from edge to edge of the canvas and purged abstract art of any hint of spiritual uplift. Despite their portentous titles (“Die Fahne hoch!” for instance, or “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor II”), the paintings reference nothing outside themselves. “What you see is what you see,” Stella declared, providing the Minimalist movement with a pithy and enduring slogan.
If Stella helped spawn the Minimalist movement of the ’60s, he was also its best-known defector. In the late 1970s, he did an unrepentant flip-flop, pursuing deep space and baroque curves as fanatically as he had once eschewed them. Works such as the Museum of Modern Art’s “Giufà, la luna, i ladri e le guardie” (1984) pile metal cones and columns into a nine-foot-tall assemblage that juts off the wall. He produced, with very mixed results, a profusion of giant metal reliefs, undulating and glittery constructions sprayed with automotive paint. Some of them are hard to relate to, except as spectacle, and feel like a cross between the Bauhaus and a fun house.
“Die Fahne hoch!” from 1959. “What you see is what you see,” Stella said, providing the Minimalist movement with its defining slogan. His Black canvases represented a direct assault on gestural painting, implying that expressionism and even human suffering had lost their allure as subjects for art. Credit…Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Whitney Museum of American Art
