Stella’s Year Of Magical Painting
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The year of 1958 was one of enormous productivity and bold experimentation for Frank Stella. Recently graduated from Princeton University, Mr. Stella moved to New York City and proceeded to paint over 30 canvases. A small but illuminating exhibition of works from this nascent period, “Frank Stella: Paintings 1958–1965,” is now on view at Peter Freeman, Inc. Three from those months of furious production and two later works bracket Mr. Stella’s breakthrough period when he produced his canonic black paintings and underscore Mr. Stella’s propulsive energy. Seen comparatively, the paintings articulate how Mr. Stella, who likes to describe himself as a builder, took apart and rebuilt the infrastructure of abstract painting.
When Mr. Stella created the earliest work in the exhibition, “Your Lips Are Blue,” in many ways he was still painting like the abstract expressionists who dominated the art scene in the 1950s. A confectionary combination of off-white, mauve pink, and pastel blue, the canvas reflects Mr. Stella’s continuing exploration of horizontal stripes, the rectangle, and the conflict of figure against ground. The freely-applied brush strokes, alternating bands of color, and even drippy remnants of spilled paint, however, were all part of the well-established iconography of the abstract expressionist movement. In particular, the scrawled text “your lips are blue” at the bottom of the canvas, a milder version of Mr. Stella’s usually scatological art graffiti, was both a reference and a challenge to the romantic musings found in Robert Motherwell’s “je t’aime” series. Mr. Stella has said of this working period, “I was pushing abstract painting as hard as I could,” and he possessed a compulsion not to separate himself from his predecessors, but to bluntly interrogate their subjective impulses and ultimately move painting forward.
From the same year, “Yugatan” and “Delta,” which face each other across the gallery room, are proto-visions of his canonic Black painting series. There is still a tremendous amount of activity on the surface, yet one can see how Mr. Stella had already begun to ruthlessly edit his work.
In “Yugatan,” muckish brown stripes alternate with glistening bands of black enamel. There is a diagonal thrust into the center of the painting that establishes a recessive perspective, but the illusion is almost dissolved in the darkness. The craquelure in the enamel appeared almost immediately after the paint dried, evidence of the painting’s experimental nature. Working for the first time with commercial paint, Mr. Stella needed to master its weight, sheen, and responsiveness to the canvas support. “Delta,” on loan from the National Gallery of Art is the first black painting using all industrial materials. Mr. Stella considers it among his most important works. Here, however, Mr. Stella has not yet abandoned illusionistic space. The canvas is dominated by a deductive pattern of v-shaped stripes emanating from short vertical stripes at the top and bottom of the painting. The orthogonals of the continuous chevron pull the eye inward. Moreover, faint traces of red and green, concealed color that would reassert itself only a few years later, are clearly visible through the bands of enamel paint.
Stella painted “Palmito Ranch” in 1961, and it’s astonishing to consider his artistic progress in these few short years of work. The lucid horizontal stripes of canary yellow practically hum and brush has been completely submitted to the controlling order of line. Rendered in ordinary house paint, the bands of yellow yield little indication of the presence of the human hand. The only indicators of process are small pencil marks at the edge of the canvas to delineate the measured spacing between each stripe. Bright colors were Stella’s solution to problem of illusionism. As he told a class of art students at the Pratt Institute in the winter of 1959, color density, when applied in a regulated pattern, forces the illusionistic space out of a painting. Stella’s clarity of design is instantaneously comprehensible. A perfect square of monumental proportions, the iterated bands of yellow and absence of conflict lend a harmonic quality to the painting.
Once Mr. Stella had made a painting’s framed edge a critical component of its composition, he began to redesign the frame itself, building trapezoids, pentagons, and other complex polygonal shapes. 1965’s “Bafq,” named for a Persian city, is a tripartite structure of irregular rectangles joined together by alternating lateral stripes of bright green, purple, and yellow. The hard-edged stripes appear to cohere into a pattern, but maintain a random flux, shifting between long and short as well as variable color combinations. The complexity hints at the Baroque impulses that would emerge later in Mr. Stella’s career, who would ultimately pursue sculpture, wall relief, and architecture. At Peter Freeman, the latent capacity of Mr. Stella’s schematized horizontal line lies restlessly below the surface, waiting to torque, twist, and ultimately thrust itself into real space.
Until November 17 (560 Broadway, suites 602 and 603, between Spring and Prince streets, 212-966-5154).