Frank Stella: Formalism Beyond the Grave.
Who will fill our corporate lobbies now?
I remember my mother cutting my hair in our kitchen—smooth laminate floor, easy to clean up—and staring, as she snipped around my ears, at the window of the oven. Its surface was decorated with a white linear design, ovals over a rectangular grid—and I stared at and into this for happy hours over my childhood, imagining patterns and retracing them, depth and distance and endless spatial relations at play. There’s absolutely zero pathos in this story—it’s a cheerful memory of my mother’s hands taking care around my ears, beads of water and cool air on the back of my neck—but when I saw my first Frank Stella black painting, it tickled exactly this memory—of being cared for, while staring into the delightful void that is geometry’s playground.
Stella’s black paintings from the late 1950s were far in the artist’s rearview by the time I saw them in the 1990s, but who can see one today without being absorbed by their greatness? They are minimalist by art historical tradition, shaped canvases by premonition, abstract expressionist in spite of the artist’s insistence: they are so simply done and yet do so many things.
Stella, who died on Saturday, would have resisted finding anything biographical in the work—he was an arch-formalist in the thrall of Clement Greenberg, and no Stella obituary would be complete without his admonition that “What you see is what you see.” I don’t mean to say that we can stare into the black concentric stripes and guess at Stella’s biography, but everyone has a moment like my Sunday afternoon haircuts, where line and space and rectangles are enough to keep the mind full for hours. (Pity that none of those moments ever came for me during geometry class!) And the works are majestic, captivating—and feel very serious. You see the labor, the Ahab-like pursuit: they look like paintings.
II. Second Acts.
But what to do next?
After the “end game aesthetics”1 of the black paintings, Stella kept pushing. Relentlessly, and for decades, he was a serial innovator and a thought-leader, as corporate America would have it. And corporate America would have it: his paintings sky-rocketed in value in the 1980s, and a Stella became de rigueur for corporate collections and museums alike, earning a parade of opprobrium to balance the decades of appreciation that had preceded: “chessboard aesthetics”2; “disco modernism,”3 and “inherently corporate”4: the “developer’s choice.”5 If the black paintings represented a resounding opening statement in a powerful career, the protractor series, the shrill-hued sculptures, the computer-generated stars—they were bigger, brighter, louder, heavier—more of everything. The artist used the term “maximalist” to describe his work, but today we have a better metaphor: it’s the fine art equivalent of the Fast and Furious franchise, each installment delivering on the promise to be even faster, more furious, and more lucrative.
In the 2014 article that coined the term Zombie Formalism,6 Stella was among the artists whose aesthetic had been pirated by the army of the undead; was he also one of Zombie Formalism’s foremost living practitioners?7
Ubiquity has a way of softening our defenses, so even the most garish of Stella’s later work has insinuated itself into the zeitgeist. I must have encountered his cacophonous wall reliefs at the same time as his black paintings, but I just tuned out these zany contraptions as gallery noise—the work of some other artist altogether. They look like the opening credits of Saved by the Bell come to life, and you might ask yourself who in the world needed that, just as I did when I finally realized that this was the same hand that made the magisterial black paintings. Let me know if you come up with anything—the best I can do is this: Frank Stella never stopped pushing, trying, digging, and painting. There are many strategies to animating the surface and its ability to pull you in and repel you away: dissonance, facileness, and candy-colored ugliness are all fair play.
This, too, is what art looks like.
Thanks for reading—and if you are reading on the day of its publication, May 7th, 2024, please join us TONIGHT at Forum Gallery for a talk with the inimitable Brian Rutenberg at 5:30 PM.
Jonathan Spies
jonathan@jonathanmillerspies.com
William Grimes, “Frank Stella, Towering Artist and Master of Reinvention, Dies at 87,” The New York Times, May 4, 2024.
Harold Rosenberg, “The Art World,” The New Yorker, May 9, 1970, pp. 103-16.
Not even Peter Schjeldahl’s unkindest comment in his review, “Big Ideas,” The New Yorker, Nov. 1, 2015, but here’s one of his most insightful: “[Stella’s fealty to abstraction] led him into willful eccentricities that may raise unkind questions about the cogency of his early triumphs.”
Roberta Smith frames more charitably, writing that Stella “has been churning out bulky colorful reliefs and even bulkier aluminum sculptures that have been increasingly viewed by many as inherently corporate,” in “A Vivid Backstory for a Stella Legend,” The New York Times, Feb. 10, 2006.
The article, “Lobbies with Stellas: The Developer’s Choice” (Dee Wedemeyer, May 12, 1985, The New York Times, p. 71), was literally reporting the choice of a particular developer, but went on to observe that Stella was a go-to for corporate lobbies.
Walter Robinson, “Flipping and the Rise of Zombie Formalism,” ArtSpace, April 3, 2014.
Ben Davis proposes an answer in “Frank Stella at the Whitney Is All Style, No Substance,” ArtNet, Nov. 3, 2015.