Art in America - March 2016_

34 MARCH 2016 CRITICAL EYE

horizon or a “true” vertical, while it’s disruptive to attend

to the way space curves around us. At easel-size, the

flat, rectangular picture plane provides a homogeneous

unity, which over centuries has become an unnoticed

convention, though it simplifies the complications of

actual vision. By attaching sculptural forms to the wall

and presenting them as paintings, Stella interrupts this

comfortable unity. Though abstract objects, these works

direct the eye along multiple angled, swooping and

overlapping picture planes. I’d argue that they realize in

three dimensions the multiple points of view of Analytic

Cubism—something like the physiological graphing of

eye movements during perception. The international

success of Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid suggests that a

formal revolution is under way that has progressed faster

in architecture, product design and science than in studio

art. Radical form-givers in many fields have moved away

from post-and-lintel organization toward more organic,

visually dynamic shapes and relationships.

To call a Stella construction florid and undisciplined

suggests a dismissive distaste for curving forms. Stella’s

K.81 combo(2009), part of the “Scarlatti K” series, creates

a complex vortex of views. A huge piece anchored to the

wall and floor, it extends some 10 feet into the viewer’s

space. Colored curves of Protogen RPT (a plastic resin

used in 3-D printers) twist around crisscrossing stainless

steel tubes. Similarly, the openness and deeply projecting

space of a work likekandampat (2002) make it hard to

“Arbitrariness” reflects Stella’s departure from a reduc-

tive modernist endgame. In the 1970s, Stella violated Clem-

ent Greenberg’s notion of a purely optical color field with

actual three-dimensional complications. (Stella wasn’t alone

in literally breaking the optical field: Flowers’ New York

gallery, for example, smartly reprised Richard Smith’s seg-

mented Kite paintings from the ’70s during this retrospec-

tive.) In his series “Exotic Birds” (1976-80), Stella attached

cutout curves of painted aluminum to wire mesh grounds.

By the end of the ’70s, these gaps between the painted plates

were arguably having more influence on Neo-Expressionists

than abstract painters, as Julian Schnabel, for example, began

painting over broken crockery, and Anselm Kiefer over straw.

Both Stella’s “Exotic Birds” and his “Indian Birds” (1977-

79) are abstract, but their jumps of color suggest flashes

of wings among clusters of foliage—far from rigorously

non-referential Minimalism. The baroque representational

compositions that Philip Pearlstein was making by 1982

have more in common with Stella’s 1981 “Circuit” series—

reliefs made up of thickets of separate curvilinear planes—

than with the neoclassicism of figurative contemporaries like

Alfred Leslie or William Bailey. In works by both Stella and

Pearlstein, complex shapes project forward into the viewer’s

space with dynamic counter-sliding diagonals.

“CRAZY,” “WACKY ”—their opposite, probity, is still

defined with synonyms like “uprightness” and “rectitude.”

It’s instinctual to cling to the classical stability of a straight

View of “Frank
Stella: A
Retrospective,”
showing (left to
right)Gobba, zoppa
e collotorto, 1985;
Chodorow II, 1971;
andSt. Michael’s
Counterguard,

1984. Courtesy
      Whitney Museum of
      American Art,
      New York. Photo
      Ronald Amstutz.