ART IN AMERICA 33
CRITICAL EYE
Defending Late Stella
by P.C. Smith
THE FRANK STELLA retrospective recently on view at
New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art encountered
unusual critical resistance. While acknowledging the central-
ity of Stella’s early work, many reviewers were hostile toward
his later work, from the 1980s onward. Peter Schjeldahl
noted inThe New Yorkerthat the exhibition “ends with one
crazy-looking mode after another”—“disco modernism” and
“willful eccentricities that may cause unkind questions about
the cogency of his early triumphs.”^1 Critic Ben Davis wrote,
“Stella’s many career breakthroughs feel less like the existen-
tial drama of the classic tortured artist and more like watch-
ing someone solve a Rubik’s Cube.” Skeptical of Stella’s
“swollen theatrics” and “savvy spectacle,” Davis nevertheless
claimed to appreciate “how wacky they are,” sayingLa penna
di hu(1987-2009) “looks like Vladimir Tatlin got drunk
on Four Loko and went on an AutoCAD bender.”^2 Other
critics I spoke to at the Whitney’s press preview said Stella is
overexposed already in comparison to hard-edge abstraction
pioneer Al Held, for example, and argued that Judy Pfaff had
arrived at Stella’s maximal, curvilinear, off-the-wall format
first. (Or was it John Chamberlain, whose wall-mounted
crushed automotive metal Stella collected?) Even earlier, in
Rosalind Krauss’s stringent account inArt Since 1900, Stella
was said to have wandered into “arbitrariness” as early as the
1967 “Protractor” series, part of a wider crisis in modernism’s
pictorial logic and notion of historical progression.^3Frank Stella:
kandampat, 2002,
tubing, stainless
steel and aluminum
with fiber, approx.
16 by 17 by 8½
feets. Photo Steven
Sloman.All Stella images,
except where
noted, courtesy
Marianne Boesky
Gallery, New York;
Dominique Lévy,
New York/London;
and Sprüth Magers,
Los Angeles/
London/Berlin.
© Artists Rights
Society (ARS),
New York.COMING SOON
“Frank Stella:
A Retrospective,”
at the Modern
Art Museum of
Fort Worth, Tex.,
Apr. 17-Sept. 4.P.C. SMITH
is an artist based in
New York.