36 MARCH 2016 CRITICAL EYE
that he means to summon ecological shipwreck, and the
works themselves are emotionally expressive.
Stella would have preferred that this retrospective
begin in 1987,^6 where the Museum of Modern Art’s sur-
vey of that same year ended, and indeed one both enjoys
and regrets the intense winnowing that Auping and his
team had to make from Stella’s prodigious output. For
those of us who grew up with Stella’s early work as a fait
accompli, an opportunity to see his later development
in greater depth has been missed. Even with numerous
exhibitions around the world every year in museums
and private galleries, most works in “Moby-Dick,”
“Imaginary Landscapes” (1994-2004),^7 “Scarlatti K”
(over 500 pieces based on 18th-century harpsichord
sonatas) and other later series have yet to be shown. Far
from overexposed, Stella seems barely introduced.
Stella is relentlessly presentational and unaffected
by doubts. In his 1986 book analyzing pictorial space in
canonical artworks,Working Space, he addresses the issue
of quality, contrasting it with excitement. “Quality in art
is always in jeopardy; often it is effectively neutralized.
In its place, excitement becomes everything. No artist
ever perceived quality without experiencing doubt, but
all artists experience unattended, unqualified excitement.
This is why and how art endures.”^8 Stella’s late work
is obstinately experimental and probably stands at the
beginning, still, of a revolution in curvilinear forms.
His success straight out of college gave him the
financial resources and courage to realize his work on a
grand scale, with technical collaborators and innovative
materials. Some hold this against him: “Art for corporate
lobbies” is one common formulation. But rather than a
corporate player, Stella is actually more like a reincar-
nated Russian Constructivist, in a less Stalinist period,
who has thrown off petit bourgeois painting habits in the
prolific pursuit of brave new forms.“Frank Stella: A Retrospective” debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, Oct. 30, 2015-Feb. 7, 2016. After its current showing in Fort Worth, it will
appear at the de Young, San Francisco, Nov. 5, 2016-Feb. 26, 2017.- Peter Schjeldahl, “Big Ideas,”he New Yorker, Nov. 9, 2015, p. 84.
- Ben Davis, “Frank Stella at the Whitney Is All Style, No Substance,” artnet
news, artnet.com Nov. 3, 2015. - Rosalind Krauss, Hal Foster, Yve-Alain Bois and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh,
Art Since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism,New York,hames
& Hudson, 2005, p. 410. - his recurring motif of Stella’s consists of dropping out the spaces inside of a
painted grid after that grid has been twisted and distorted, so that the openings
reveal forms that seem to continue behind—hence a twisted windowpane efect. - Michael Auping, “he Phenomenology of Frank: ‘Materiality and Gesture
Make Space,’” inFrank Stella: A Retrospective, Michael Auping with contribu-
tions by Jordan Kantor, Laura Owens and Adam D. Weinberg, New Haven and
London, Yale University Press, 2015, p. 36. - Pac Pobric, “Frank Stella: A Romantic After All,”he Art Newspaper,
November 2015, theartnewspaper.com. - Auping, p. 37. he series is based on Alberto Manguel and Gianni Gua-
dalupi’s bookDictionary of Imaginary Places(1980), which compiles the most
famous fantasy landscapes in literature. - Frank Stella,Working Space,Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press,
1986, p. 127.
Above,Raft of the
Medusa (Part I),
1990, aluminum
and steel, approx. 14
by 13½ by 13 feet.
The Glass House, a
site of the National
Trust for Historic
Preservation.
The Grand Armada
(IRS-6, 1X), 1989,
painted aluminum,
approx. 10 by 6 by
4 feet. Fondation
Beyeler, Riehen/Basel.
Photo Robert Bayer.