Frank Stella at 80 — still the bad boy of American art
De Young Mueum presents the gamut of grounbreaking career
Frank Stella stunned the art world at just 23 when four of his nearly all-black paintings went on exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Along with 20 more black paintings in that series, they brought Abstract Expressionism’s colorful, energetic style to a halt.
“The black paintings didn’t make me well known — they made me notorious,” Stella recalled.
Now, at 80, Stella is still the bad boy of American art.
A career survey at San Francisco’s de Young Museum (through Feb. 26) includes two of Stella’s black paintings and a sampling of almost everything he’s done to confound the art world. The latest are explosive, fragmented sculptures made with computer programs and 3-D printing.
“Frank Stella: A Retrospective” included nearly twice as many works as are on view at the de Young when it opened at New York’s new Whitney Museum of Art a year ago. Stella was once more, after six decades, notorious.
Some New York critics who’d followed Stella for years longed for his earliest works, which ushered in Minimalism (in contrast with the later style he would call Maximalism).
In reviews, Stella’s latest works were called sculptural “concoctions.” His big stripes and shapes were likened to office lobby installations. One critic said the retrospective “will likely provoke varied opinions, on a scale from great to godawful.”
Nobody’s going to forget Frank Stella.
Stella was — and is — one of the few artists who changed the way people look at art. These are works that should provoke museum visitors: paintings, sculptures and assemblages filling the de Young’s special exhibit space, representing more than half a century of American art.
Even in this condensed version of his career, there are notable highlights from every period. They range from the fuzzy-striped canvases he made before the graphic black paintings to models for sculptures made of scrap metal and cut-up soft drink cans.
“Everything about Stella’s art is physical — a process of building things up, tearing them down and reworking them,” says cocurator Michael Auping of the Fort Worth Museum of Art in the exhibit catalog.
Auping’s counterpart at the Whitney Museum, Adam Weinberg, declares, “Stella is a revolutionary: fearless, persistent, stubborn, but always original.”
Museum visitors don’t need a background in modern art to respond to the exhibit. The vivid colors, mysterious blackness, geometric shapes, massive and flamboyant sculptures have undeniable impact.
The “pow!” aspect begins in the de Young’s cavernous lobby, where the museum has installed Stella’s 40-foot-wide painting “Das Erdbeben in Chili,” an intentionally messy abstract depiction of a South American earthquake. Downstairs in the exhibit itself, the radiating colors of “Damascus Gate” stretch 50 feet across a gallery wall.
But the installation seems both skimpy and sprawling, as if Stella’s most influential early paintings were merely a prelude to the parade of big show-stoppers. The New York version of the exhibit may have argued more forcefully for his works from the 1950s and ‘60s and let the sculptures march off into the entertainment sphere.
Two black paintings from a series of 24 are on view, and they give some sense of Stella’s initial impact. Up close, compared to familiar reproductions, the 1959 works are not flat black. Brushstrokes are evident, and the lighter “pinstripes” are actually the raw canvas left uncovered by the black paint.
Those two works are immediately overshadowed by the bright blue, green, yellow, red and gray concentric squares of “Gran Cairo” (1962) and the target like stripes of “Marrakech” (1964), painted with fluorescent alkyd.
Stella’s more mellow copper oil paint series is represented by the right angle “Creede II” (1961). It’s installed at the de Young with an amusing coincidence: The pinstripes parallel the metal grid of the air conditioning vent on the floor just below it.
The colored, curving stripes of the “protractor” series, with interlocking figures on shaped canvases, are probably Stella’s best known images. In this exhibit they offer a transition to architectural, painted wood constructions. These are like Cubist relief sculptures ready to fly off the walls.
Two of the de Young’s big galleries are filled with multilayered, painted, wallmounted sculptures, some 10 feet tall. One of the most impressive (and abstractly understandable) is “The Whiteness of the Whale” (1987). The swirling panels reflect Stella’s inspiration, Melville’s “Moby-Dick.”
Other layered, threedimensional cutouts are overwhelming in their size (up to 9 by 10 feet) and overlaid with paint, graffitilike markings and even glitter.
The almost freestanding sculptured “contraptions” include “K.81” (2009) and “K.459” (2012), swirling masses of Plexiglas that seem to be perched on metal tubes.
For all the spectacle of these big pieces, the pleasures of the exhibit are often in Stella’s more modest works.
In the midst of the last gallery you’ll find 16 intriguing small constructions made of stainless steel tubing, wire and plasticlike material, laid out on wood panels resting on sawhorses.
On one wall is a two-by-two-foot maquette for “Khar-pidda” (1977). It’s made of wire mesh and gracefully cutout pieces of soft-drink cans, showing more of the artist’s hand than the massive finished sculpture nearby.