The surprising tale of Stella’s black painting
The artist talks about art, life, his own quirky art collection and a surprising secret, writes
AT 82, the artist Frank Stella has done it all and isn’t terribly concerned about what anyone thinks. He is matter-of-fact and unguarded, secure on his perch in the pantheon after two solo retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art. He can — and did — wear white house-slippers to an interview and photo shoot. Deal with it.
Stella became art-famous not long after graduating from Princeton in 1958, and he has been lauded for achievements like his early Black Paintings, with their dazzling geometric rigour and their power to inspire statements like his “What you see is what you see.”
His work evolved over the decades — the brightly coloured Protractor series became a landmark of contemporary art, too, and eventually his work got sculptural and very big. His studio is now in the Hudson Valley, where he goes often to make pieces that require a lot of space, like “adjoeman” (2004), a stainless steel and carbon fibre sculpture weighing some 1,360kg that was once featured on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But he and his wife, Harriet McGurk, a paediatrician, live in the same three-storey house in Greenwich Village that he acquired in the late 1960s
It’s packed with art — there are many large, mid-century abstractions by friends, peers and those he admired when he started, including Jules Olitski, Hans Hoffman and Kenneth Noland. But there’s also a seascape by the 19th-century painter Eugene Boudin hanging over a landscape by the Fauve artist Henri-Edmond Cross. An early, figural Mondrian hangs in a hall.
Stella has decidedly unique taste in art, further evidenced by the works he is selling at Christie’s, including an untitled 1927 Miro oil being auctioned in London and David Hockney’s A Realistic Still Life (1965), also up for auction. In New York in May he is selling a double portrait of a couple by the Dutch painter Jan Sanders van Hemessen (1532); two of his own works, WWRL (1967) and Lettre sur les Aveugles I (1974); and Helen Frankenthaler’s The Beach Horse (1959). Estimates for those works range from US$1.5 million (RM6.14 million) to $7.5 million.
Why sell? “It’s nice to have some liquidity,” Stella said. “You don’t want to save everything for the end. I won’t be around forever.”
Explaining the works he has amassed, Stella said, “Artists collect differently from other people,” an idea he elaborated on in a chat. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. I like all of the art that I grew up with. I wouldn’t bother making art if I didn’t like what the people around me were doing, too. It wouldn’t be any fun. It’s nice to come home and look at paintings. I don’t have to look at my own paintings. To me, it’s a relief. I like seeing them and not worrying. I don’t have to adjust anything. I only own four fakes. Some people are naive enough to say, “Will you authenticate this work?” (laughs). And then we don’t send them back when they’re fake. They’re serious, these guys making them; they know what they’re doing. Take the Jack Youngerman for example (Aztec III / 1959). Artists see each other’s work, and they recognise the touch. The way your hand moves, you can see Jack in the brush there, and you can see the same thing in the Olitski (Hot Ticket / 1964). You know how the paint goes into the canvas. You can see how it builds the work. I always loved Helen’s work and everything about her. And the most interesting part of our tiny “relationship” was she once offered to exchange art, for one of her smaller ‘58 paintings.
It was so off-putting, with Helen and with Bob (Robert Motherwell, her husband then) in their apartment, I couldn’t bear to exchange because it didn’t feel to me that there was anything I could offer that would be equal. I was just intimidated. And then I bought this painting from a dealer because it was a ‘59 painting, from that period.
The van Hemessen, I just saw it in a catalogue in the ‘80s. The part I couldn’t resist is that it’s from 1532. The idea of having a Northern Renaissance painting in your house!
Around the time I bought that, there was another Dutch Renaissance picture by Pieter Aertsen. It was estimated at US$300,000 or US$400,000 in a sale in Amsterdam, and I was alone in my hotel room in London. I don’t know how much I had to drink or whatever. But anyway, I picked up the phone and I started bidding.
So I say, “OK., maybe I’ll go to US$400,000,” and believe me, I didn’t have the money. And I kept bidding. And I was up to US$680,000 for this painting. And the guy is saying, “US$690,000.” And I’m saying, “What am I doing?” (laughs) “Who am I?”