Art

...What you see is what you see," he remarked in one of his most famous maxims...

...What does occupy most of his intellectual attention is an inquiry into the pure properties of painting itself, a paradoxical insistence that ideas stay the hell away from the creative act...

...The motor force in Stella's creativity is not the imperative claims of pure forms upon a gifted sensibility, but rather a kind of blind obeisance to an intellectual construct for which, so to speak, the artist has fallen hook, line, and sinker...

...Spurning the enticements of color and tone, its only concession to retinal p. asure was to punctuate its essential blackness with a few thing defiantly insufficient grey stripes...

...JAMES GARDNER James Gardner writes frequently on the arts for Commonweal...

...ART STELLIFEROUS STELLA A REAL 'MOMA'S BOY' Saint Paul, on the road to Damascus, was probably not more shocked by his conversion to the enemies' creed than Prank Stella would have been had he known in 1960 what he'd be doing today...

...Next the stripes too were rejected in favor of pure fields of color, whose variety was intensified, and set into ever more irregular shapes...

...The ultimate fact about Stella, once you take away the hype, the hipsterism, and the honoraria, is that he, like Zuccari, is one of the best painters of a period that has not been kind to the art of painting...

...Instead of laying bare the artist's unique and unstable psyche, its entire art seemed to consist in an unquestioning obedience to the dictates of geometry...

...One of the pleasures of these latest works is that they challenge chaos and, indeed, are occasionally overwhelmed by it...

...By the early seventies Stella was fashioning "paintings" out of wood, and conjuring them into the third dimension...

...That art was invented in order to explore the potentials of art is apetitio principii, something that is, in the most precise philosophical sense of the word, an absurdity...

...Soon after he made a name for himself with the black-stripe paintings, their foursquare rectangulations were jettisoned in favor of canvasses of indeterminate shape, while the idiosyncratic stripes were set against yellow and pink backgrounds...

...But when they succeed, as they sometimes do, we see why, in what must be considered a dry spell in the history of painting, Frank Stella is the best we have...

...The two qualities go together, revealing an expansive ego that clamors to be taken seriously...

...In cinematic terms, Frank Stella began as Greta Garbo and ended up as Carmen Miranda...

...Stella, the intellectual painter par excellence, is a strange kind of intellectual nonetheless...

...This man as well was of a highly verbal bent, churning out reams of writing to justify his artistic practice...

...Just as Caravaggio reinvigorated figurative painting circa 1600 after about three generations of Mannerist fripperies, so Stella believes that he has given back to abstraction the vitality it lost circa 1960...

...But Greenberg's belief that painting was going somewhere specific, and that the true artist wanted to help it get there, was implicitly accepted, and has never been rejected, by.Stella...

...At present, this arrogation of the rights of sculpture has gone so far as to challenge the propriety of calling Stella a painter at all...

...No longer did paint ooze from the canvas with all the gooey tactility of Viennese confectionary: suddenly it was so reticent and self-effacing as to deny its own existence...

...In his slightly later paintings of concentric squares in different colors, he is usually boring, but can occasionally produce quite memorable and wholly unexpected color correspondences, which, thrown across a wall as they are, crackle with majestic self-assurance...

...Each of the paintings in his next series bears the name of an exotic bird...

...At that time, the uncorseted dynamism of Pollock, the moodiness of Rothko, and the eloquent anger of de Kooning had gained in respectability precisely what they were losing in revolutionary fervor...

...These paintings, perhaps more than any others, set the stage for the Minimum of which one heard so much in the seventies...

...Stella was brought up on the teleological criticism of Clement Greenberg, for whom the history of Modernism, from Manet to the Abstract Impressionists, was the ever greater ascendancy of form over content, until forms themselves, the puckers and splodges of acrylics, the weavings of the canvasses themselves, had become all important...

...Only two considerations can conceivably sustain artistic practice, the creation of beauty or the creation of meaning...

...What he doesn't realize is that he is closer to Caravaggio's arch-enemy, the mannerist Federico Zuccari...

...Stella flattered himself that in fact he was embattling Greenberg, because his painting differed greatly from the sort that Greenberg advocated, and because he continued his explorations long after Greenberg had proclaimed that the limit had been reached...

...He appears, for instance, not to have a single idea in his head...

...They lead logically to his latest works, in which the color combinations are baffling in their diversity, the materials range from paint and cardboard to sheets of metal and chicken wire, and recurring motifs of post-modern cones threaten to leap out and skewer the bewildered art lover...

...But this declaration, if not an outright lie, evinces an almost acrobatic flair for self-deception...

...Briefly stated, Stella assumes eccentrically, and without explanation, that painting is the primary visual art, and that painting's primary goal is to create a compelling sense of space...

...Though, in the early seventies he did a series called Polish Villages - named for towns in which the Nazis burned synagogues - he seemed not even to try to rise to the moral challenge implicit in his titles: what he has created are simply good, well-made paintings, pleasing, sometimes very pleasing, but never great...

...As he stands revealed in the exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Stella rarely attains to the sublime beauty or the implicit moral authority of the masters of Abstract Expressionism...

...For the past twenty-five years, Stella, like a trolley car gliding down the ringing grooves of art history, has been, if we believe him, chugging on alone into the uncharted regions of painting's future...

...Using a furious diversity of materials, forms, and visual ideas, he had extended this principle so far by the end of the decade that the holes in his paintings were big enough to jump through...

...His hero is Caravaggio, to whom he pays his highest tribute: he compares the seventeenth-century Italian to himself...

...Many were the raised eyebrows and much was the consternation when the young Stella unveiled his black-stripe paintings...

...And suddenly, in Frank Stella, they seemed to have their answer...

...But the truth is that only an anchorite could sustain such intensity of abnegation for any length of time, let alone make a career of it...

...The lines weave in and out of one another, marked by stripes and a rainbow of colors...

...Here Stella has dis-integrated the painting into its components, and reconstructed them in three dimensions...

...But in so doing, Stella has put the cart before the horse...

...That it could never satisfy a temperament as restless and inquisitive as Stella's has been abundantly proved in the recent retrospective of his works from 1970 to the present at New York's Museum of Modern Art, an exhibition that will also be seen in Minneapolis, Houston, and Los Angeles...

...Whatever convictions he might have about politics, religion, or child-rearing he keeps to himself, and they seem essentially beside the point...

...To complete the analogy, now that Zuccari's writings are unread, and his doctrines merely amusing anecdotes in the history of ideas, we are left with the indisputable fact that he was quite a good, painter...

...The two constancies of Stella's career are bigness and an unshakable foundation in theory...

...Similarly, he was the most decorated and lionized painter of his generation, and the darling of the academies...

...Yet this is more or less the doctrine that he propounds in Working Space (Harvard, 1987), which comprises the Norton Lectures that he delivered at Harvard in 1984...

...To the art lovers of the day, for whom the history of painting was an epic tale of unceasing ascension towards a less than manifest destiny, the great question was, "What next...

...But many things have changed since Stella made his precocious debut on the stage of the international art scene...