Stella Timeline & Notes

“There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is to learn something and the second is to make something.” –Stella, The Pratt Lecture (1960)

“The aim of art is to create space – space that is not comprised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subjects of painting can live.” – Stella, The Norton Lectures (1983-84)

 Born 1936, Malden, MA  Attends high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts  Attends college at Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried.  Early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development o Abstract Expressionism huge o Influenced by Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, among others  Moves to New York 1958  Begins career as a pioneering Minimalist o Comes to painting after the success of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s . Learns from lessons of Ab Ex  Pollock – “all-over” effect  Newman – stripes (“zips”) o Interested in the concept of space within space o Initially learns to paint with a palette knife o 1958: sees Jasper Johns show at Leo Catelli Gallery . Begins using stripes as a compositional unifier . Also inspired by Motherwell’s Spanish Prison Window paintings (paints a square or rectangle in center of the canvas) – punches out a compartment of space from the center of the canvas o “Learning how to make paintings is just about learning how to paint, literally learning what painting and canvas do. Paint and canvas are not spiritual.” o Logic trumps emotion o Stella’s compositions over the course of his long career have vacillated between consolidation and fragmentation.  Black Paintings (1958-60) o Again, Newman and Pollock are predecessors o Approached the canvas they way he would paint a house – a form of geometry to be mapped out and covered o Uses house painting brushes and enamel house paint o Draws attention to edges of the painting . “What painting wants more than anything else is working space…Painting does not want to be confined by boundaries of edge and surface.” -FS o A forceful, object-like quality o Gives each canvas “a good, thick coat.” . Enamel is oil-based, so has a semi-glossy finish o Lines seem to hover just above the canvas o SPACE is created o Lines aren’t straight o Hand painted - illusion of a gentle vibration o “The aim of art is to create space – space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space in which the subject of painting can live.” o Emotional resonance (see Rothko, late paintings) o Their bluntness pushed abstract painting into a new era of materialism o Stella a bridge between Ab Ex and Minimalism . Sets stage for minimalists  Flavin’s first diagonal piece made in 1963  Judd’s first floor box piece made in 1964  Andre has first show in NY in 1965  Judd’s essay, “Specific Objects,” published in 1964  Aluminum Paintings (1960) o While working on Black Paintings, begins drawings for future works o Drawings of jogged lines - “Sort of like the design for an electric circuit” o Walter Darby Bannard suggests he shape his canvases to accommodate these jogged lines o Aims to visually activate the surface image o Uses thick, metallic paint . Drags when applied to a surface . Bits of metal suspended in oil . Oil bleeds onto the canvas – painterly quality . This, and notches in the canvas, connect the painting to the wall – architectural engagement! o 1964: Seen as a key innovator of the “shaped canvas” and included in The Shaped Canvas @ the Guggenheim, organized by Lawrence Alloway o 1965: With then-wife Barbara Rose and curator Henry Gehdzahler organized Shape and Structure . Included painters and sculptors (Andre, Bell, Bannard, Judd, Morris, Larry Zox, etc.) . Stella embraces simple geometry . Built compositions from systems of shapes o 1966: Included in Alloway’s Systemic Painting at Guggenheim . Shape as unit in a systemic process of building material . Incrementally filling in or enclosing space o Stella has a hybrid identity – Minimalist/Abstract Painter . Chamberlain referred to Stella as a “sculptor’s painter” . Stella calls his paintings “facts of life.” . His paintings part of a lineage of “found color”  Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918)  Richter’s Ten Colours (1966)  Copper Paintings (1960-61) o How much can be taken away from a painting and it still be a painting? o Removes even more from the canvas o Take the shape of letters: T, U, L H o More empty space than physical painting o Uses barnacle-inhibiting paint from painting his dad’s sailboat hull o Less absorbent paint than aluminum paint; needed to apply more layers for a substantial line o Grittiness of paint and reddish hue make these paintings even more sculptural o Robert Irwin notes: “that’s what you did with a Stella. You analyzed it, like an equation. You didn’t get religious.” o “What you see if what you see.” (said about Black Paintings) o HOW you see is very important o Phenomenology is big in art circles at the time o Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) huge for the minimalists; Stella never read it, but it’s in the air. o Could be seen as the “Early Renaissance of Minimalism” . A prelude to Andre’s famous Cuts (1967) (Dwan Gallery)  The Benjamin Moore Series (1961) o Uses color as if it is inert and hard (like the wall) o Titled after the American interior house paint company o Matte finish, “dead” o Tactile, like slabs collaged onto the wall o Lines taped, so no bleed – machinelike quality o Connects to Hofmann (push and pull) and Albers (Interaction of Color, 1963) (Concentric Square Series, 1950-76)  The Concentric Squares (1962-63) o Hyper-energized color combinations o Kaleidoscopic o Still using Benjamin Moore paints o Paints tightly masked stripes in a concentric manner o How much color can you fit into one painting? o Uses a system to choose colors – predetermined rules relate to conceptualism . “Color progression schemes” . “Color opposition schemes” . Begins with seven colors (ROYGBIV)  Doesn’t always start with red, but always follows the progression o Also paints Double Concentric Squares o Optically confusing and dazzling o We try to reason out the system used o Frustrated that we can’t look at both squares at once! o See Robert Morris’s use of the gestalt (an organized whole that is perceived as more than the sum of its parts.)  Mitered Mazes (1962-63) o Color sequences are broken into four quadrants o Divided by four diagonal lines creating an “x” o One of the four lines doesn’t start at corner, creates a disjunction o Appears to be spinning, like a pinwheel o Relates to Synchromists (founded 1912, American) - abstract "synchromies" based on an approach to painting that analogized color to music; among the first abstract paintings in American art.  Purple Paintings (1963) o Greenberg promotes Stella’s materiality and flatness o Defining of late-Modernist painting o Stella: “what the best art does is give us the best of both worlds – the perceptual and the pictorial.” o The central, empty section of the canvas is radically enlarged (he had made a small hole in the center of some Aluminum Paintings) . The painting a frame for the wall . Each one named after a friend . Tongue-in-cheek set of abstract portraits . Acknowledge the wall as a partner in modernist abstraction . “Those holes in the paintings offered a peek into site- specificity...the next step would be to simply eliminate the canvas and paint directly on the wall, which fortunately he never did.” – LeWitt . Makes the wall part of the picture plane . Hybrid space – both pictorial and literal . See Stella’s Norton lectures titled “Working Space” (1983-84) for a detailed investigation of space in painting’s history.  Notched V / Running V Series (1964-65) o Thinking back to the Copper paintings, the V is a naturally notched form o Suggests a directional force, like an arrow o Large and hefty paintings o Have an aerodynamic quality o The Running Vs seem to dance across the wall; strong directionality o Muted, similar colors: “When you have four vectored V's moving against each other, if one jumps out, you dislocate the plane and destroy the whole thing entirely.” o Auping sees these as a new category of expressionist abstraction (connecting Ab Ex and Minimalism) . Translates the gestural side of Ab Ex into sleek geometric form  The Moroccan Series (1964-65) o Partially inspired by bright Arabic tile patterns o Uses fluorescent paint o Absorbs and reflects light intensely o Color seems to swell from the surface o Best viewed from a distance o Illusionism destroys the flat objectness of painting o The painting’s presence radiates into the room  Irregular Polygons (1965-66) o Stella begins shaping his canvases in a more radical way o Asymmetrical forms o Even thicker stretcher bars o Brightly-colored planes give the sense of instability o Huge size, so the wall is fully engaged o 11 different compositions in the series; 4 versions of each composition o Due to thickness of the stretcher bars, the paintings seem stacked together – Objects! o Some look like giant origami; looks like the forms have been pushed together . “When I pushes the bands into the rectangle or the square, they had a really interesting quality. You could feel something like what happens when you make sculpture, when you are pushing something together…like it was spring-loaded and about to shoot into space.” o Looks to Russian Suprematism and Constructivism . Malevich . Lissitsky – reveals potential space for abstract painting; Proun rooms (Malevich’s planar vocab of pure, abstract form + real space)  “An interchange between painting and architecture  Canvas treated as a building site! o Stella questioning the future of abstract painting and the form it would take o Auping sees them as a link between Cubism and American sculpture in the 1950s (David Smith’s Cubis and Tony Smith’s crystalline geometries)  Protractor Paintings (1967-71) o Recall abstract frescoes – near-architectural scale o Many named after Near and Middle Eastern cities o Shapes hail from the ancient drafting tool o Looks to Pollock’s layering & patterning and manuscript illumination (very pared down) . Linear interlacing o Seen by many as too decorative . “There is nothing wrong with abstraction being liked outside the art world. There is the implication that it makes you less intelligent. Sometimes I think you could argue the opposite.” . The perfect example of popular abstraction –Baldessari . “Decorative” a dirty word = pretty . Matisse a big influence  “The powerful assault of the senses” and “physical presence of color”  Polish Village Series (1971-73) o A series of sculptural paintings o Named after all the Polish synagogues destroyed by the Nazis during WWII o Used a computer to diagram the compositions, then a computer-assisted table saw for the cuts of the places . Often used left-overs from these cuts to add to his compositions  This form of recycling continues in his later series o Blend of illusionistic space with physical space (pictorial vs. literal) o Began as large-scale collages in which the surface physicality was slowly developed (used paper and felt cut-out shapes applied to canvas) o Plywood, pressboard, and Masonite mounted on wood . Later casts some in aluminum honeycombed panels fitted tightly together, creating a seamless object o Not simply shaped canvases, but fitted parts o Tongue-in-groove construction references the architectural subjects of the titles o Stella’s work of the ‘70s influences architect Frank Gehry . “Peeling” the planes of architecture away to “create layers of exterior space” o Planes that are closer to the wall often painted in colors that expand, and vice versa . A challenge for the viewer to readily identify the space . An extension of Minimalism’s tenant that the viewer needs to move around a piece to fully appreciate its gestalt o The idea of building a painted object out from the wall not novel . Louise Nevelson, John Chamberlain, James Rosenquist all do this in the ‘60s  Stella unique in that he identifies as a painter, not a sculptor  Brazilian Bird Series (1974-75) o Carries on Stella’s interest in thick planes o This times, cuts them into thinner, sleeker wedges o Geometry as dynamic form! o Stella became interested in birds via his wife, Harriet McGurk . A visit to the FL Everglades impressed upon him the ability of the birds to both stand out and camouflage themselves  “They were like Impressionistic gestures that came in and out of focus in the space of the landscape.” o As Auping states, some of these gestures appear to fly off the wall . Not representative of birds, but allusional . Analogy to flight is literal  Sleek, radical triangles take on a wing-like quality  Many of the gestures have become disengaged from the ground, invisibly connected to an interior support  Thus, they appear to hover in front of the painting o The surfaces of the ground and some of the shapes are etched with circular, gestural marks . Reveal hard metal beneath . Resemble vibrating planes or geometric feathers o Stella not sure how to classify them at the time . Very relief-like . But not sculpture, as Stella intended for them to be seen head-on  Exotic Bird Series (1976-80) o 1975: Purchases a set of commercial templates (ship curves, railroad curves, and French curves) used for technical and mechanical drawings in the fields of boat building, railroad track construction, and architecture o Uses these to create preparatory drawings for the series o Stella cut these shapes out, suspended them in a picture-like rectangle, and combined them with hand-painted and hand-etched markings. . Roy Lichtenstein and Gerhard Richter also using abstract painted gestures in their work in the ‘70s (the dead gesture) . In contrast, Stella revives the gesture! . Auping calls it “abstract pictorial theater”  The Indian Birds (1977-79) o Continue to allusion to birds and flight o Even more densely layered o Uses a vocabulary of curved and twisting materials mixed with hand- drawing and painting o Evolved in stages . Begins with drawings . Progresses with collages and maquettes . Ends with metal fabrications  Circuit Series (1980-84) o Come naturally from the weightless, motion-filled compositions of the many “Birds” series o Density and accumulation of gestural signatures increases o Titles refer to automobile racing tracks . Blue-collar side of Stella . According to the artist, “car racing involves a particular kind of perception…you experience line and space very quickly. A painting is a very compressed frame that you look at in time, but more slowly. However, you can make the painting speed up.” o Gesture and space become super-elastic and hyper o Erratic curvatures suggest color, speed, and vibration (they move the eye rapidly around the painting) o Auping sees them as a gestural version of the ‘60’s Concentric Squares o A pictorial AND literal spatial experience!  Cones and Pillars Series (1984-87) o Follows Cezanne’s assertion that a painter should organize, or abstract, nature into cylinders, spheres, and cones o Stella doesn’t use reductionist abstraction, but adds as much to abstraction as possible (anti-minimalist) o The shapes in this series come from abstract imagery in a cycle of prints Stella made that was inspired by El Lissitsky’s Had Gadya lithographs (1919). . Had Gadya based on the folk song sung following Seder (religious meal served in Jewish homes on the first or second night of Passover)  Stella struck by the fact that Lissitsky, as an abstract painter, addressed narrative (these works were representational)  The folk song build on itself, with each new phrase adding to the list of phrases, which is always repeated.  Stella saw this build-up as analogous to the creative process (additive) o Reminded him of his work, and of Jasper Johns’s statement: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” . Stella creates his own narrative of abstract characters  Cones and pillars  “A battle of forms fighting for position in the paintings”  Also inspired by Cezanne and late-19th century diagrammatic drawing in an architectural treatise on classical stone cutting. . Stella titles the works after a cycle of Italian folktales selected and retold by author Italo Calvino (1956)  Calvino recast the stories to make them more generally accessible  Paintings titled AFTER their completion (be careful of attributing too much narrative illustration to Stella’s “literary” series; he often matched titles to works after their were created, not before.)  Loomings Series (1986-88) o Shows the dense, postmodern landscape of Stella’s own artistic history o Recycles previously used forms o Some of these works blend into the Moby Dick Series (see next entry) o The Loomings titles give us much information, and tell us that once certain formal arrangements are finalized, they are available as a sort of library of forms (available to be repeated in different variations, at a range of sizes, and with myriad painted treatments). o In total, the exhaustive nature of Stella’s cataloguing system shows an inclination toward seriality, formal variance, and perhaps a penchant for quasi-mechanical production (think of the Irregular Polygons, which are four versions of eleven different compositions – the logic of the copy on display). . First letter (“S,” for example) is from Stella’s own studio cataloguing system  It corresponds to a dominant form within that particular piece (shows that the piece belongs to a certain family of shapes)  No metaphoric meaning . The number after the letter signifies differences between versions within that specific group; tells us which variation it is (1, 2, and so on…) . The element after that first number (“3X,” for example) shows a designation of scale, as in “three times” larger; the piece is three times larger than the “1X” example.  Pieces in a group are editioned in a group of multiple identical copies. . Finally, “2nd version: points to the ultimate variation within this group o Registers a unique surface treatment – painted or etched  Moby Dick Series (1986-97) o 266 unique artworks produced o Each references one of the 135 chapters in Melville’s novel, plus his “Etymology,” “Extracts,” and “Epilogue” sections. o Not clear where the series begins and ends o This series shows and increasing formal complexity as the series evolves o Often framed in terms of a “narrative turn” in Stella’s work o Again, works titled after they are completed, so not meant to directly illustrate the novel o Saw beluga whale at aquarium with his two sons – made him think of Melville’s novel o The compositions often recall the presence of the ocean (waves, swells, movement, etc.) . Begins with a wave-like form in his abstract illustrations of Had Gadya o Concepts of the wave and the whale are massive gestural forces o The search for the “great white whale” becomes a metaphor for artistic work. o Stella enters the realm of freestanding sculpture . Cast and poured steel assemblages . Rusted from being outside . “Stella brought his expanded idea of painting into the medium of raw steel.” . Stella’s 3-D murals are filled with the history of his studio debris  Bali Series (2002-09) o Like his “Easel Paintings,” Stella making large, 3-D constructions o Look like sails in a gust of air o Sail-like forms seem to glide out from the wall o Very interested in sails, the “first unstretched canvas” –Stella o Expressive entities that operate in open space  Imaginary Landscapes (1994-2004) o 1992: Invited to do a project for the Princess of Wales Theater in Toronto o Paints huge murals that cover the architecture . Fantasy imagery covers 10,000 square-foot theater . Collages images from his visual vocabulary to form a language for the space o The subtract and semi-abstract forms are the basis for Imaginary Landscapes . Titles based on Dictionary of Imaginary Places (1980) by Alberto Manguel and Gianni Guadalupi . Consolidates the most famous fantasy landscapes in literature . Appeals to Stella’s interest in the fantasy aspect of utopian abstraction as invented “space-scapes” – desire to inhabit those fantasy places o Smoke as a shape enters his work . Stella interested in formation made by cigar smoke . Hollis Frampton’s 1971 film Nostalgia, documents Stella blowing a long smoke ring . Sculptural! . Intrinsically part of space . “I’ve always wished I could do that with a painted gesture.” . 1990: His assistants arranged an 8-foot square box with lights and 6 synchronized cameras; he blew smoke into the box . Images fed into 3D imaging programs to create 3D computer maps of the shapes . Matisse’s cutout, computerized and objectified  Scarlatti K Series (2006) o Inspired by the sonatas of Baroque Harpsichordist Domenico Scarlatti o Looks at close correlation between abstraction and music . Kandinsky argued that abstract painting could elicit the same emotional responses as music . 3-footed paintings . Touch both wall and floor . Viewer must move around the works to take them in (sculptural) . Stella makes Kandinsky’s abstract space real  Circus of Pure Feeling for Malevich, 4 Square Circuits, 16 Parts (2009) o Made of wooden tables with small gestural constructions on top o Title refers to Malevich’s White on White (1918) o Malevich believed in an emotion-centered definition of abstraction o The title and the small, coiled forms refer to Calder’s Circus (1926-31), where he twisted wires into small circus performers on a large, table-like platform o Stella paying homage to two pioneering figured of abstraction o “Materiality and gesture make space.” o It’s all about space, really.

Note: Those series represented in the Modern’s exhibition are all listed. There are series not listed here, and the total number of the artist’s series is nebulous.

Helpful links: http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/809 http://www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/features/the-serial-impulse/frank-stella.html http://www.moma.org/collection/artists/5640