Hollis Frampton. Untitled [Frank Stella]. 1960

Hollis Frampton. Untitled [Frank Stella]. 1960. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (930100). Courtesy Barbara Rose. © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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MARIA GOUGH

No matter what we say, we are always talking about ourselves. —Carl Andre (2005)

I begin with a photograph taken in 1960 by the photographer and soon-to- be filmmaker Hollis Frampton in the West Broadway studio of his friend Frank Stella.1 The painter’s upturned head rests against the window sill, almost decapi- tated. Defamiliarizing his physiognomy, the camera relocates his ears below his chin, trunking his neck with its foreshortening. Arrested, his eyes appear nervous, jumpy. On the sill sits a sculpture by Frampton and Stella’s mutual friend Carl Andre, Timber Spool Exercise (1959), a weathered stump of painted lumber, its midriff cut away on all four sides. This giant spool was one of dozens of such exer- cises that Andre produced in summer 1959 with the help of a radial-arm saw in his father’s toolshed in Quincy, Massachusetts, a few examples of which he brought back to New York. Propped atop it is a small mirror, angled to reflect the jog of Union Pacific (1960), a twelve-foot-long aluminum oil painting that leans against the opposite wall of the studio, its two lower corners and upper middle cut away, itself a mirror-image duplication of the square-format Kingsbury Run (1960) of the same series. Stella later described the particular character of his notched Aluminum series as stemming from the “traveling” of its bands: “[a] band moves along, jogs to the

* An earlier version of this essay, which beneﬁted immeasurably from the generous reading and critical judgment of Jodi Hauptman, was ﬁrst presented at “Stella from the Start,” a symposium held at the Harvard University Art Museums in April 2006 in conjunction with the exhibition Frank Stella 1958; in revising the text for publication, I have not attempted to disguise its origins as a talk. Warm thanks to the exhibition’s curators Harry Cooper and Megan Luke for inviting me to contribute to the symposium, and to all its participants, as well as to the graduate students and faculty at Yale University. In writing this essay I have learned much from many scholars, but I should especially like to acknowledge the work of Yve-Alain Bois on noncomposition and of James Meyer on Minimalism and Carl Andre. At different times, Jamie Nisbet, Alexandra Schwartz, and Pan Wendt provided invaluable research assistance, while Rachel Churner contributed indispensable editorial expertise, for which I am most grateful. 1. Getty Research Institute, Special Collections and Visual Resources, Barbara Rose Papers, inv. no. 9300100, box 8, folder 1.

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side, and turns again to resume its original direction. That makes up a given unit: a band with a jog in it.” In contrast to the stripes of the Black paintings, these units were intended to be “more individual,” he added, “put together to make something like a ‘force field’ (to use the term . . . Andre was fond of).”2 As reflected in the mirror, Stella’s jogged aluminum band rhymes with the lower-left contour of Andre’s cut: each rises vertically, moves to the right, then continues its ascent. Conjoining two different kinds of opacity—the one obdurate wood, the other repellent metallic pigment—the mirror binds together the respective enterprises of sculptor and painter. But even Frampton’s photographic enterprise is thema- tized here, by a visual field given over almost entirely to a vast expanse of pure window—that traditional figure of transparency—as it slips in and out of its own silvery opacity, like the ghost image of a daguerreotype. Only barely does one notice the almost imperceptible jog in the rooflines of the two adjacent buildings facing the studio. Three friends together in New York in the late 1950s and early ’60s, making their first incursions into the world of industrial modernity: aluminum pigment, standardized lumber, photographic apparatus; the repetitive gesture, the mechanized cut, the photographic reproduction. In each case, these incursions were produced in series; while by no means exclusive to art produced since the industrial revolution, the increasing recourse to the series as a primary mode of aesthetic production from the later nineteenth century onward partakes in the general basis and principle of modern manufacture, if only, ultimately, to con- found it. Consider, for example, Frampton’s famous series of fifty-two staged

2. Frank Stella, interview by William Rubin, New York, June and September 1969, quoted in William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 47.

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photographs of Stella, shot between 1958 and 1962, and collectively entitled The Secret World of Frank Stella. The best-known image in the series is Stella painting Getty Tomb in 1959, coating an unprimed canvas with two-and-a-half-inch wide bands of black enamel. To the photographic convention of the creative artist-at- work, Frampton brings great conceptual wit, delivering the repetitive labor of Stella’s monochromatic brushstroke as laconic, literalist gesture: “There is not one shot [in The Secret World] that hasn’t been made before by a photographer of reputation,” Frampton wrote in January 1963. “My intention was a massive sottisier, the prize-picture on the point of becoming cliché. . . . The series has . . . a critical atti- tude towards [photographic] tradition. . . . The photographs, to encompass my aim, had to be ‘bad.’”3

3. Hollis Frampton, in Carl Andre and Hollis Frampton, “On Forty Photographs and Consecutive Matters: Part I: January 26, 1963,” in 12 Dialogues, 1962–1963, ed. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design; New York: New York University Press, 1981), p. 57. Bruce Jenkins notes that The Secret World began as a parody of a just recently published album of over three hundred photographs of the seventy-ﬁve-year-old Picasso at home and at work in his studio, by the professional photographer David Douglas Duncan (The Private World of Pablo Picasso [New York: Harper, 1958]); see Bruce Jenkins and Susan Krane, Hollis Frampton: Recollections/Recreations (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984), p. 46.

Frampton. Untitled, from The Secret World of Frank Stella (1958–62). 1959. Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. © Estate of Hollis Frampton.

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Since the Secret World has never been published in its entirety, I cannot say whether our battered photograph officially belongs to it or not. Certainly, the extraordinary formalism of this portrait of one of the most fecund triangulations within the history of postwar art is doused with a good measure of the same wit. Hitherto unpublished as far as I know, the photograph is today found out of place, stashed together with sixteen later photographs of Stella by the legendary Italian photographer Ugo Mulas, from which it could not be more removed in sensibility. Mulas, an exceptional portraitist of celebrity artists, captured a whole generation in the mid-1960s in New York. The numerous pages devoted to Stella in his 1967 book New York: The Art Scene narrate the course of a typical day in the painter’s studio as he works upon the Notched V series (1964–65).4 Not only does Mulas doc- ument an altogether different moment in Stella’s trajectory, one in which the latter’s status and reputation had already been largely consolidated, but he also deploys the very convention of the creative artist-at-work that Frampton had paro- died just a few years earlier. During the critical years contemporaneous with the production of that parody, Stella himself developed an altogether different sensibility, a literalist sensibility wherein the work of art was supposed to reveal nothing other than its constitutive unaltered materials and explicit mode of construction: “What you see is what you see.” He would later disavow this literalism, in order to become—or perhaps return to being—the artist of his own painterly, even optical, desire. But not without having first exerted enormous influence on Andre, who would go on to become a major protagonist of Minimalism, of which literalism was, as Hal Foster reminds us, but one important thread.5 The present essay revisits the development of literalism in the early work of Stella and Andre. The first section covers familiar ground, attempting to put into a readily accessible format the basic chronology of their mutual exploration of ser- ial, modular, and deductive procedures between, roughly, 1958 and 1962; readers already familiar with this production should simply skip ahead. In section two, I endeavor to shed new light upon an old problem: on the one hand, Andre’s invocation of Constructivism in order to give a name to this newly emergent modular economy, and, on the other, the total absence on his part of any reference at the time to their most significant precursor in this regard, the Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko. (Andre would certainly acknowledge Rodchenko later, however, and fully.)6 While the modular procedure remains with Andre to this day, both Stella and Rodchenko abandoned it early on, though for vastly different rea- sons; in the final section I reconsider these farewells.

4. See Ugo Mulas, New York: The Art Scene (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967). 5. See Hal Foster, “The Crux of Minimalism,” in The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1996), pp. 36ff; and James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the 1960s (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). 6. See Carl Andre, Cuts: Texts 1959–2004, edited with an introduction by James Meyer (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005), p. 229.

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One After the Other

Carl Andre first encountered the work of Stella in the painter’s Lower East Side storefront studio in late summer or fall 1958. He was completely baffled: “Frank showed me the paintings and they were colored stripe paintings, the stripe paintings before the black ones, very beautiful paintings; but I looked at them and I thought that Frank was a lunatic. I thought that he had probably gone off the deep end with these things, because in a sense my idea of art was still related to some kind of abstraction from something outside of art. It had to be derived from something, and seeing Frank’s paintings—they were very obviously derived from paintings and have that interior logic. But I just didn’t see that: to me they just looked blank.”7 At the time Andre was writing lyric poems, as well as making (now no longer extant) paintings and drawings in such media as A-1 Steak Sauce and ballpoint pen on shirt cardboard.8 Andre’s incomprehension attests to the critical distance between the two artists at the moment of their initial encounter, a distance that would be much reduced over the next two years. Soon after this first meeting Andre began to work in Stella’s studio whenever the painter was not around, producing in spring 1959 his first substantial body of sculptural work, the Ladders, by chisel carving lumber scavenged from construction sites. An essentially subtractive mode of production that was as time-consuming as it was labor-intensive, the Ladders seemed to offer, in the very tactility of their making, an antidote to the perceived blankness of the stripe paintings. Andre had studied the work of Constantin Brancusi in the Arensberg collection at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the older sculptor’s example is everywhere felt: roughly hewn lumber, an insistence on carving over modeling, and—most significantly here—an increasingly modular rhythm to the sculptural cut. Clustered together in Frampton’s photograph (taken when Andre was no longer working in Stella’s studio),9 these carvings appear like shivering totems. Andre called them negative sculptures, on account of the concave forms he carved into them, typically on one side only. Passing by one day while Andre was

7. Ibid., pp. 267–68. 8. See Hollis Frampton, “Dear Enno Develing,” in Carl Andre (Brussels: Daled, 1975), reprint of an exhibition catalog published by the Gemeentemuseum in 1969, p. 7. My discussion in this ﬁrst section is based on the following sources: Ibid.; Rubin, Frank Stella; Rudi Fuchs, Carl Andre: Wood (Eindhoven: Van Abbemuseum, 1978); David Bourdon, Carl Andre: Sculpture 1959–1977 (New York: J. Rietman, 1978); Andre and Frampton, 12 Dialogues; Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965 (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1986); Meyer, Minimalism; Andre, Cuts; and Harry Cooper and Megan R. Luke, Frank Stella 1958 (New Haven: Yale University Press; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Art Museums, 2006). 9. I should note that crucial to our understanding of Andre’s literalism is Frampton’s extensive photographic archive of the sculptor’s very early and otherwise unknown—because either lost or destroyed— sculptural production; for reproductions, see the 1969 [1975] Gemeentemuseum catalog, and especially Andre and Frampton, 12 Dialogues. The inception of the archive coincided with Frampton’s own turn away from poetry to the still camera in late 1958. While Andre was “systematically mutilating . . . bits of wood”— this was just before Andre’s literalism had set in—he, Frampton, began to “systematically photograph” it.

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carving Last Ladder (1959), Stella, in the midst of his new Black paintings, “looked at it approvingly,” Andre later recalled, “and then walked around it and then ran his hand down the back untouched side of the beam of timber . . . and said, ‘That’s sculpture, too.’ It was the side I hadn’t cut. . . . [I] was very annoyed with that statement at the time and sort of put it in the back of my mind and forgot about it.”10 Spending the summer of 1959 in Quincy, Andre eventually renounced hand carving in favor of mechanized cutting, producing Timber Spool Exercise, for example, and generating about forty or fifty small wooden sculptures using a radial-arm saw. “Each pass of the saw blade through the block reminded me of Stella laying down a brushstroke,” Andre later commented.11 As far as I know, this is the first instance of Andre directly engaging with Stella’s “interior logic,” and it is significant that the terms of that engagement have to do with a Carl Andre. Ladders. 1959. Photo by Hollis conflation of the painter’s manual Frampton, ca. 1960. © Carl Andre. procedure (the brushstroke) with the sculptor’s mechanical action (the saw cut). According to Frampton—who pho- tographed the sculptures outside on the lawn, and who later modestly referred to himself as Andre’s archivist (“not a very competent or thorough archivist, granted, but the only one available”12)—Andre’s operating premise in the series was that “the original block in itself implied a set of sculptures; [Andre] had, in each case, tried to end up with one of them.”13 At this moment Andre’s process was still subtractive, even if deductive in some incipient sense; this would soon change. Andre returned to New York in fall 1959 but not to Stella’s studio; instead, he moved a DeWalt radial-arm saw into Frampton’s large apartment on East Broadway. There the saw was no longer used to generate whole sculptures, as it had been in

10. Andre also acknowledged that what Stella had said was “kind of prophetic” since the course of his “own gradual development was to go away from cutting into the material and using the material itself”; see Andre, Cuts, p. 268. 11. Ibid., p. 273. 12. Frampton, “Dear Enno Develing,” p. 7. 13. Ibid, p. 9.

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Quincy, but rather to notch identical, factory-cut two-by- four-inch lengths of new fir wood so as to assemble what he called Pyramids, his first particle-based modular structures: stepped progressions that are symmetrical from side to side and from top to bottom, with identical elevations on all four sides. “My Pyramid has the cross section of Brancusi’s Endless Column,” Andre stated, “but the method of building it with identical, repeated seg- ments of two-by-four lumber derives from Stella.”14 Always provisional in construction, the Pyramids, of which eight or Andre. Pyramid with DeWalt saw. 1959. nine were made that fall, Photo by Hollis Frampton. © Carl Andre. could be disassembled for storage or travel. That same fall Stella continued to work on the Black paintings, including producing second, more rigorous versions of several in preparation for Dorothy Miller’s exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, which opened in December 1959 and ran through the new year. At this time, Andre became the painter’s first amanuensis, writing the famously affectless “Preface to Stripe Painting” for Stella’s entry in the exhibition catalog: “Art excludes the unnecessary,” Andre explains. “Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. . . . His stripes are paths of brush on canvas.”15 Frampton contributed the accompanying photograph of the painter, selecting it from his Official Portraits, a series of black-and-white photographs of Stella, Andre, Walter Darby Bannard, and the architect Richard Meier, in which each subject affected a range of different bodily and gestural eti- quettes under the photographer’s direction—here, as the artist Budd Hopkins later put it, Stella affects a “nonchalant Madison Avenue contrapposto, one hand resting casually in his pocket.”16

14. Andre, Cuts, p. 271. 15. Carl Andre, “Preface to Stripe Painting,” in “Frank Stella,” in Sixteen Americans, ed. Dorothy C. Miller (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1959), p. 76. 16. Budd Hopkins, “Frank Stella’s New Work: A Personal Note,” Artforum 15, no. 4 (December 1976), p. 59; quoted in Caroline A. Jones, The Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 116.

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Notched on the perimeter and sometimes in their centers, the Aluminum paintings of early 1960 were Stella’s first shaped canvases and the most “nonrelational” to date. Relationality, as he explained in a talk presented to art students at the Pratt Institute that winter, was one of the two problems with which his work had been wrestling. “I had to do something about relational painting, i.e., the bal- ancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other,” he told his audience, because “[t]he painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there,” had become “more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory.”17 (Here Stella invoked a problem with a long history, dating at least back to the Moscow Constructivists’ struggle against their compatriot Vassily Kandinsky in the early 1920s, and indeed far beyond, a history that was not evident even to Stella as he wrestled with the problem.)18 The “obvious answer,” he had finally realized, was symmetry: “make it the same all over.” But symmetry alone does not vanquish “illusionistic space”; essential also is a “regulated pattern” that “forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals.” The second of his two problems was to find a “method of paint application” that would follow and complement this new “design solution”; the answer lay in “the techniques and tools of the house painter.”19 A small sheet of micro sketches in pencil, no doubt prepared for sequential transfer to the blackboard during the lecture, locates the origins of Stella’s nonrelational painting in the colored stripe painting of 1958, which he divides

17. Frank Stella, “The Pratt Lecture” ( January or February 1960), in Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976), p. 78. 18. See Yve-Alain Bois, “Noncomposition in 20th-century Art: The Impossible Task of Erasing Oneself,” unpublished lecture, University of Michigan, 1997, as well as a forthcoming collection of essays on noncomposition. 19. Stella, “The Pratt Lecture,” p. 78.

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into two loose categories: on the left side of the sheet are his “wanderings,” which move in multiple directions, engaging here and there with the work of contempo- raries such as Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn, and Barnett Newman, whose names appear among the annotations on the sheet. To the right, by contrast, are his “last color paintings,” which form a bridge to the Black and Aluminum series insofar as they directly address the problem of relational painting. Just to the right of center, for example, is a configuration of horizontal lines in “one- color,” a simple way in which to reduce jockeying on the canvas (cf. Astoria [1958] or Blue Horizon [1958]). Systematic execution offers a second possibility: below a sketch of the lost canvas Luncheon on the Grass we read: “1. image / no more / repainting / reworking / start to finish / one operation in 4 parts / or coats.” The penultimate sketch represents a third path: Stella’s early attempt to drive out illusionistic space through the deployment of a regulated pattern, though this attempt is compromised by the “left-over areas” in its upper-left and right corners (cf. Reichstag [1958]). The last sketch on the sheet, referring to a pictorial configuration that he would use repeatedly over the next several years, offers a putatively “final solution” to the problem of relational painting: A square field divided into four quadrants, each an index of the total field itself, each bearing an identically regulated right-angled L-pattern. This last offered a solution final enough to engender the Black paintings, only one of which is fully nonrelational—Tomlinson Court Park (1959)—but ultimately not quite final enough for Stella, who would, in the Aluminum series on which he was working at the time of the Pratt talk, eliminate even the boxy corners engendered by the L-pattern by working on specially prepared “notched” stretchers. Consider, for example, his initial proposal for what would eventually become Union Pacific: the upper drawing on a piece of personal stationery belonging to his mother. As recounted by the late William Rubin, Stella had been happy with the jogging of the bands, but both- ered by the rectangles that were left-over as a consequence—the four long thin vertical rectangles,

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one at each of the lower corners, the others in the center. When he showed the drawing to his friend Bannard, however, the latter immediately suggested he simply cut out the offending rectangles.20 As a result, the perimeter-driven deductive principle began to take on more and more of the character of a modular unit instead, a “given unit” as he put it. In his Pratt lecture, Stella presented a compelling narrative about the origins of this modular format in the struggle of the last color paintings to rid themselves of relationality. Insofar as his accompanying sketches define that early body of work as the crucible for the eventual development of a modular economy, it is important to note the retrospective and partial nature of his analysis of his own practice, which tends to close down other concerns or directions that were latent or even salient in the 1958 corpus. Most especially, the one contemporary artist whose work is everywhere present in the Pratt sheet, but whose name is conspicuously absent, is Jasper Johns; it is perhaps Johns alone, at least in retro- spect, who can reconnect the two sides of the sheet, its wanderings and its proto-nonrelational paintings.21 It was Andre who not only retrieved Stella’s lecture from the trash into which the painter had tossed it once he was done with his self-analysis, but also archived it, pasting its three pages into his handmade book of autobiographical materials, Passport (1960).22 (Given the seminal role the Pratt episode has played in the subsequent interpretation of Stella’s work, ever since the late Robert Rosenblum obtained it from the sculptor for publication in his 1971 monograph on the painter,23 this archival gesture was not insignificant, to say the least.) Passport is an assemblage of found fragments, including inter alia a poem by Stella and a reproduction of his small adhesive burglar tape version of Jill (1960), as well as bureaucratic materials such as Andre’s actual passport papers. The book might best be considered in relation to the radicalization of authorial convention that the three friends affected around this time (Andre writing Stella’s catalog entry, for example, or Frampton’s at once tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious letters to the editors of the New York Herald Tribune and Newsweek, both of which he penned under Stella’s name). At the same time, however, the significance for Andre of the seman- tic content of the Pratt talk should not be underestimated. As a compelling narrative, the talk provided an explanation of the interior logic driving Stella’s work, a logic that not only unblanks that work for Andre but also serves to confirm or reconfirm the new direction of the latter’s own work from the Pyramids forward.

20. See Rubin, Frank Stella, pp. 47–50; and also Christian Geelhaar, Frank Stella: Working Drawings, 1956–1970 / Zeichnungen (Basel: Kunstmuseum, 1980), pp. 43–48. 21. On the signiﬁcance of Johns in the early work of Stella, see esp. Megan R. Luke, “Objecting to Things,” in Frank Stella 1958, pp. 1–65. 22. Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass. See James Meyer, “Carl Andre’s Passport,” in Jock Reynolds et al., Addison Gallery of American Art: 65 Years (Andover: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1996), pp. 313–14. Passport was published in a xeroxed edition of thirty six by Seth Siegelaub and the Dwan Gallery in 1969. 23. See “Appendix,” in Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (New York: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 57.

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Andre. Found Steel Object Sculpture. 1961. © Carl Andre.

Over the next couple of years Andre intertwined the modular and the found. Working on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 1961, he started collecting odd pieces of scrap iron—hooks, springs, ball bearings—which he then assembled into loose configurations based either on gravity or the structural limits of the materials themselves, producing thereby the so-called Found Steel Object Sculptures. He became interested in the sculptural possibilities of the readymade industrial-waste component, and started to purchase collections of identical modules in various industrial materials such as steel, glass, plastic, and aluminum. With these he made various found-object steel sculptures, including a group of small-scale rudimentary stack formations of 1-by-1-by-3 inch units: Is, Ts, Us, Ls, and post-and-lintel structures. No carving, no sawing, no notching, no interlocking. Just piling, and not even much of that. Though infused with Dada and Surrealist affiliations to the found object, it is also possible to see these sculptures as partial or provisional realizations of his Elements (1960), which he proposed in wood, but for the large- scale execution of which he was unable to secure financial and logistical support. Stella, meanwhile, radicalized his notching of the Aluminums into the fully shaped Copper series (1960–61), which also took the form of Ls, Us, Ts, and so forth. This new series eliminates altogether the residual, proto-op ripple effect or vibration caused by the jogging in the Aluminum paintings. By 1961, therefore, a modular economy was consolidated in the work of painter and sculptor alike. But almost as soon as it had been, their art world paths began to fork. With Leo Castelli’s regular sponsorship of his work, Stella produced an extraordinary sequence of literalist paintings, one after another: the Benjamin Moore paintings (1962), the metallic Purple paintings (1963), the Star paintings (1964), and the Notched V series and the Running V series (1964–65).

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Opportunities proliferated for Stella; soon, Mulas would arrive to photograph a day-in-the-life of Frank Stella. Unable to find a dealer, by contrast, Andre entered into a phase of intense experimentation in multiple directions.24 Exhibition-wise his first break did not come until 1964, when he was invited to participate in a group exhibition at the Hudson River Museum, Yonkers. To 8 Young Artists he contributed Cedar Piece, a stunning revision of one of the 1959 Pyramids, comprising nineteen tiers of notched interlocking units. The substitution of the original two-by-fours with four-by-fours made the modular economy of the Pyramids that much more emphatic and, as David Bourdon notes, enlarged the structure overall, giving it a more massive appearance. Thus, when the opportunity to exhibit finally arose, Andre deployed the modular principle with unprecedented force and vigor. The following year in Shape as Structure, co-curated by the critic Barbara Rose, the curator Henry Geldzahler, and Stella himself, Andre exhibited Redan (1965), a zigzagging snake of identical wooden beams interlocked directly on the floor.25 Interfering more directly than ever before with the physical space of perception, Redan represents the transition of Andre’s modular principle from the confines of a literalist sensibility developed in response to Stella, to the more complex phe- nomenological enterprise that would soon become known as Minimalism. Before that could happen, however, Andre needed to have claimed that literalist sensibility as his own.

Carl Andre Is a Constructivist

Given how much Stella disliked Constructivist painting—“I never liked that painting and I didn’t want to do that painting” he confessed in 196626—there is something more than merely provocative about Andre’s assertion, in his November 1962 dialogue with Frampton, that “Frank Stella is a Constructivist.”27 Taking turns at a single typewriter and addressing such topics as painting, sculpture, photography, and plastic poetry, the two artists played an extended game over the course of a year, beginning in October 1962, in which they each adopted the role of the Socratic dialectician who educates his or her interlocutors by ﬁrst confounding them. Andre makes this rather startling assertion in the midst of a rumination in their dialogue “On Painting and Consecutive Matters” about the nature of his own

24. See Frampton, “Dear Enno Develing,” p. 11. 25. See Meyer, Minimalism, p. 121. 26. Frank Stella, in conversation with Philip Leider at “The Current Moment in Art” symposium, San Francisco Art Institute (recorded April 16, 1966; broadcast on KPFA Berkeley; recording distributed by Pacifica Radio Archives, Los Angeles, archive number BB0919.01–.08), emphasis added. Transcript courtesy of Caroline A. Jones. 27. Andre and Frampton, “On Painting and Consecutive Matters: November 4, 1962,” in 12 Dialogues, p. 37.

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current process of experimentation: “The innovation in twentieth-century western painting, Constructivism, provides the suggestion of an aesthetic which could be the basis for a kind of plastic poetry which retained the qualities of both poetry and painting. I am experimenting toward that end, anyway.”28 Upon hearing this declaration of ambition, Frampton at first rambles around, searching associatively for something, anything it seems, with which to respond: “Without going back to tenth-century illumination, uptown to Madison Avenue layout, or across the river to Cubist collage, let me toss out some antecedents,” he begins, and proceeds to rattle off a list of some of the major modernist poets such as Apollinaire, Marinetti, Mallarmé, as well as a reference to Robert Indiana’s “sign-paintings.” But then he interrupts himself, as if suddenly finding focus: “But why ‘Constructivist’?” he asks. “You flood me with the yellowed celluloid of [Naum] Gabo and [Antoine] Pevsner.”29 Frampton is perhaps flashing back to his visit the previous month, in the company of Andre, to a large exhibition of Joseph Hirshhorn’s extensive sculpture collection in the just newly opened Guggenheim museum in New York.30 There the Russian brothers were presented as Constructivism’s pioneers, a rehearsal of the standard line that had been circu- lating in art magazines and exhibition catalogs since the 1930s.31 In the late 1950s, for example, when ARTnews initiated a new semi-regular “so-and-so makes a construction” feature—modeled on the magazine’s already popular “so-and-so paints a picture” column, it is no surprise to learn that the first “so-and-so” was none other than Gabo. But Frampton’s invocation of Gabo and Pevsner obliges Andre, in accor- dance with the Socratic form of their communication, to define his terms, which turn out to have nothing whatsoever to do with celluloid, and everything to do with their mutual friend. “Let me indicate some shadow of what I mean by a Constructivist aesthetic,” Andre responds. “Frank Stella is a Constructivist. He makes paintings by combining identical, discrete units. Those units are not stripes, but brushstrokes. We have both watched Frank Stella paint a picture. He fills in a pattern with uniform elements.” Thus defined, Constructivism is a formal operation based on the combination of identical units, on the making of a pattern with uniform elements. Andre’s next sentence, however, is more ambiguous: Stella’s “stripe designs,” he asserts, “are the result of the shape and limitation of his primary unit.”32 Yet precisely what is, according to Andre, Stella’s “primary unit”? The first stripe, or the shape and extension of the support itself? Or are

28. Ibid., pp. 34, 37. 29. Ibid., p. 37. 30. See Andre and Frampton, “On Sculpture and Consecutive Matters: October 14, 1962,” in 12 Dialogues, p. 13. 31. See Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” in Reconstructing Modernism, ed. Serge Guilbaut (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986), pp. 85–110. 32. Andre and Frampton, “On Painting and Consecutive Matters: November 4, 1962,” in 12 Dialogues, p. 37.

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these apparent alternatives in fact the same thing in the end, since, within the logic of what Michael Fried would soon call deductive structure,33 the first stripe is determined by the perimeter? At this point, as Karen Rapp has lucidly argued, Andre seems less interested in the deductive relationship of Stella’s anticomposition to its framing edge than in the way Stella uses a modular unit to generate an allover pattern. For Andre the agency in Stella’s painting lies in the unit, she writes, rather than the perimeter.34 I emphasize this because Andre goes on to provide, in the very next sentence, a subtly different definition for his own Constructivism, thus both aligning and dif- ferentiating himself from Stella. “My Constructivism,” Andre announces to Frampton, “is the generation of overall designs by the multiplication of the qualities of the individual constituent elements.” As an example, he types into the body of the dialogue itself a purely modular “plastic poem about the rose,” a poem to Gertrude Stein.35 Andre’s is a particle-based rather than deductive economy, therefore. On the one hand, Andre’s definition of Constructivism in terms of a modular procedure is rather narrow: only a small, if nevertheless highly significant portion of what generally goes by the name Constructivist painting—that amal- gam of Neo-Plasticism, De Stijl, Russian Constructivism, and the Bauhaus of the 1920s, together with their global diffusion into the late 1950s—is modular in nature. On the other hand, Andre broadens Constructivism by conflating it with that larger search for a unitary mode of production that drives modernism more generally: “Cézanne is a Constructivist and Renoir is not. Cézanne’s brushstroke is the atom of which his paintings are composed. Renoir’s stroke by comparison is miasmic, a mist lost among mists.”36 Andre’s invocation of Constructivism in 1962 is prompted, I would suggest, by his desire to give a name and a history to the shared modular experiment in which he and Stella had been mutually involved since fall 1959, and, thereby, to relieve himself of some part of the singularity of the debt that he owes to Stella, a debt that he scrupulously and generously acknowledges, as we saw in the previous section, at almost every turn. In other words, Constructivism helps Andre, in con- frontation with the work of his friend, to claim the “interior logic” of the last color paintings, or the “given unit” of the Aluminums, as also his own. From our vantage point today, it is curious that given Andre’s characteriza- tion of Stella and himself as Constructivists that the very artist most relevant to

33. See Michael Fried, “New York Letter,” Art International 8, no. 4 (May 1964), p. 41; idem, “New York Letter,” Art International 7, no. 5 (May 1963), pp. 69, 70; and idem, Three American Painters (Cambridge, Mass.: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965), pp. 40, 46. 34. See Karen Rapp, “Constructivism as Critical Currency: Rhetorical Uses of Constructivism in Amer- ican Minimalism,” unpublished manuscript, Department of Art and Art History, Stanford University, 2004. 35. Andre and Frampton, “On Painting and Consecutive Matters: November 4, 1962,” in 12 Dialogues, pp. 37, 38. 36. Ibid., p. 37.

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their literalist sensibility, Aleksandr Rodchenko, appears nowhere in his published dialogues with Frampton. This absence is striking because, some four decades earlier, the Russian Constructivist had developed both deductive and modular procedures in the generation of his second and third series of spatial constructions respectively, within the laboratory phase of Constructivism.37 In these constructions, Rodchenko pushes into space the industrial aesthetic and materiological deter- minism that he has been exploring since 1915, and especially since 1919, through the use of the materials and tools of both geometer and house- painter: compass, ruler, enamel- Aleksandr Rodchenko. No. 9. 1921. based pigments, rollers, stencils, and sandpaper.38 To these materials and tools he now adds those of the construction worker: wood veneers in the second series, hewn lumber in the third. Like those of Stella at his most literalist, Rodchenko’s second series is based upon a deductive principle.39 Each of its five constructions is produced in the same way: on a sheet of pear-tree plywood, Rodchenko draws a given geometrical figure—circle, square, triangle, oval, or hexagon—and then repeats this figure to form a regularly diminishing pattern. The lines drawn are then cut with a saw, and the ribs thus created rotated into space, thereby affording the once flat plane its three-dimensional volume. Most of the ribs are fixed with wires, but these are removable so that the work can be collapsed back into a plane and stored away. Insofar as the overall structure is deduced from the initial figure selected, only the initial cut—determining the shape and width of the first rib—is the product of subjective choice. Rodchenko’s deductive procedure exemplifies his effort to eliminate such choice, or, to invoke anachronistically Stella’s problem, to dispense with relationality.

37. For the full run of all three series of spatial constructions, see the ﬁne compendium Galerie Gmurzynska, Alexander Rodchenko: Spatial Constructions/Raumkonstruktionen (Ostﬁldern: Hatje Cantz, 2002). Yve-Alain Bois introduced me to thinking about the material in this way; I build on his argument in my The Artist as Producer: Russian Constructivism in Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 38. See Aleksandr Rodchenko, Experiments for the Future: Diaries, Essays, Letters, and Other Writings, ed. Alexandr Lavrentiev, trans. Jamey Gambrell (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2005), pp. 123–32. 39. This paragraph is redacted from Gough, The Artist as Producer.

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Left: Rodchenko. No. 17. 1921. Right: Andre. Pyre. 1970–71. © Carl Andre.

If Rodchenko’s second series seems especially prescient to Stella’s shaped metallic Purple series, the Russian’s third series, particularly No. 17 (1921), is most specifically relevant to Andre. Most of its constructions were generated from a single modular unit, with a potential for their infinite expansion in nonrelational progressions. Take No. 17, for example: eight identical pre-cut timber lengths are stacked to form an open volume. The close similarity of No. 17 to Andre’s Pyre, one of the Elements first proposed in 1960 or 1961 but not realized until 1970–71, is striking. Certainly there are crucial differences of scale (No. 17 is a table sculpture, Pyre sits large on the floor), method of assembly (the former is fastened, the latter simply stacked), and of volume (open versus comparatively closed). Notwithstanding these differences, however, it is hard to think of a more explicit articulation of Andre’s modular procedure. “Nothing accidental,” Rodchenko asserted with respect to the deductive economy of his second series, but which equally applies to the modular procedure of his third. “Each appearance of another form depends on the initial form. . . . No one can [ask]: ‘But why this or the other?’ For given the system, it is necessary.”40

40. See ibid., p. 124.

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Why, then, the absence of any reference to Rodchenko in Andre’s dialogues with Frampton? Was his work just not accessible in 1962? With respect to originals, this was certainly the case. It was not until the late 1970s that Rubin acquired No. 12 (1921) from the Russian collector George Costakis for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Aside from this single example, none of Rodchenko’s spatial works have survived in the original, let alone entered museum collections. As for published reproductions, which were few and far between before the 1960s, the story is a little more complicated. Andre recalls having seen slides of Rodchenko’s work in an art history survey course taught by Patrick Morgan at Andover,41 but precisely what he saw remains uncertain. It is probably safe to assume that those classroom slides were likely made from the pedagogical tools available in the 1950s, such as Alfred Barr’s exhibition catalog Cubism and Abstract Art (1936), or the few textbook surveys of modern sculpture, all of which include the odd reproduction or two.42 But none of these publications reproduce No. 17, which is the crucial object, as noted above, for comparison with the work of Andre. A systematic search through contemporary journals such as ARTnews, Arts, and other magazines read by artists in the late 1950s and early 1960s turns up almost nothing on Rodchenko’s spatial constructions.43 As far as I am aware, No. 17 was published for the first time in Camilla Gray’s pioneering study The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922, a large-format book with tipped-in color plates and scores of black-and-white illustrations that appeared sometime in the first half of 1962.44 (Gray also reproduced No. 9 and No. 10.) The author or her publisher borrowed these otherwise scarce images from none other than Barr, who had a significant trove of archival photographs stashed away in his personal papers, given to him during or shortly after his 1928 visit, in the company of Jere Abbott and a translator, to the Moscow studio of Rodchenko and the latter’s fellow Constructivist Varvara Stepanova.45 Like many of his peers Andre has noted the subsequent impact of Gray’s volume on his thinking, but it was only later in the decade that this impact became significantly manifest. If Andre once remarked that Stella’s influence on him had

41. Andre later described Morgan’s course as one which “cannot be overestimated as an influence. My awareness of the art of our century sprang from it and that includes the revolutionary art of Russia from 1915 to 1925”; Carl Andre to James Meyer, November 26, 1991, quoted in Meyer, Minimalism, note 144, p. 309. 42. See, for example, Carola Giedion-Welcker, Contemporary Sculpture: An Evolution in Volume and Space (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1955), which reproduces No. 12 only, with the caption “Rodchenko, with supreme technical precision, dissolves the mass of a spherical body into compartments of air, achieving an effect of floating lightness” (154). I should note that the two Rodchenko constructions reproduced in Barr’s 1936 catalog were not in the exhibition itself. 43. My thanks to Pan Wendt for substantial research assistance on this front at the Clark Art Institute in 2001. See also Bois, “Noncomposition in 20th-century Art.” 44. Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (New York: Abrams, 1962). Judging by the date of the first review, which appeared in the Zurich magazine Du in July 1962, Gray’s book was released sometime in the first half of 1962. 45. Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Papers of Alfred H. Barr Jr., Aleksandr Rodchenko materials, Box 13.I.E.

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been “as slow and inexorable and powerful as a glacier,”46 the very same might be said of Gray’s impact on the understanding of Russian Constructivism. Despite its size and high production value, which gave the original clothbound volume a gravitas that the later, much expanded and helpfully corrected small-format paperbook edition lacks, Gabo and Pevsner continued to be open for business as Constructivists throughout the decade. Even as late as 1967, five years after the publication of The Great Experiment, the artist George Rickey was able to put the two brothers right and center in his book on the origins and evolution of Constructivism.47 But gradually, and contemporaneously with the emergence of various Minimalisms in the second half of the 1960s, the problem of defining the precise nature of the relationship of contemporary American art to that of the Soviet 1920s surfaced again and again.48 Barr’s photographs, long under wraps and little disseminated before the appearance of Gray’s book, began to crop up everywhere; everyone seemed to be knocking on his door with reproduction requests, including Guy Brett for his book Kinetic Art (1968) and James Pilgrim (on behalf of Robert Morris and Annette Michelson) for the catalog of the Corcoran’s Morris exhibition in 1969; the list goes on.49 Momentum built among artists and critics alike, and in 1971 the Museum of Modern Art presented a retrospective of Rodchenko’s work, the first ever to be held outside the Soviet Union. Curated by Jennifer Licht, a curator of contemporary art at the museum from 1962 through 1976, this small exhibition (some thirty items in all) drawn entirely from the museum’s own collections, included, significantly, the full range of media in which the artist worked: painting, drawing, graphic design, photography. But in the absence of any originals, as previously noted, the spatial constructions were represented by enlargements made from Barr’s archival photographs. No catalog was issued, but Licht published a substantial essay in ARTnews, which included Rodchenko’s No. 26 of the third series, comprising seven modular units roughly sawn from the same plank. A full-page review by Hilton Kramer that appeared in the New York Times on February 4, 1971, reproduced No. 26 and No. 9, and described Rodchenko’s spatial constructions as the “most moving” objects in the exhibition.

46. Andre, Cuts, p. 267. 47. See George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution, rev. ed. (New York: G. Braziller, 1995). 48. As Annette Michelson writes in 1967, in the opening paragraph of her review of a recent Agnes Martin exhibition, “One current preoccupation of criticism is the accurate deﬁnition of the complex relationships obtaining between the efforts of younger painters and sculptors on the one hand, and what would, on the other, seem to be their Constructivist and Neo-Plasticist precedents. A literature of critical distinction is developing with a rapidity which both symptomatizes and heightens the urgency of the problem, exacerbating, in its articulation of a formalist aesthetics, the very historical conscious- ness in which that aesthetics is grounded. There is a very particular sense in which the compositional dynamics of American sculpture and painting invoke historical precedents, only to bracket or negate them in the interest of fresh departures”; see Annette Michelson, “Agnes Martin: Recent Paintings,” Artforum 5, no. 5 ( January 1967), p. 46. 49. See the correspondence in the Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York, Papers of Alfred H. Barr Jr., Aleksandr Rodchenko materials, Box 13.I.E.

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Andre’s final realization of Pyre and the other Elements in 1970–71 might well be considered as a post facto identification with the artist by then recognized as both Ur-Constructivist and precursor to his own historical moment. “I like to think that my work is in the tradition of the Russian revolutionary artists, Tatlin and Rodchenko,” he told Willoughby Sharp in 1970.50 Whereas for Andre in 1962 by contrast, Constructivism was not so much a historical phenomenon that would trigger issues of precursors and tradition, but rather, as I argued earlier, a means by which to make the new modular economy also his own. But even when that later identification with Rodchenko finally does take place, the profound discrep- ancy between the different historical moments in which their shared modular economy is articulated ultimately differentiates one from the other in an incon- trovertible way. Furthermore, there is a fundamental sense in which Andre’s “recovery” of Rodchenko’s work at the same time reburied it, by hypostatizing it as an autonomous aesthetic: As Foster argues in a wide-ranging essay on Constructivism’s afterlife, “institutionally constrained . . . [and] also fixated aes- thetically on nonutilitarian Constructivism (the Productivist project was still hardly known),” the Minimalists fell “well short in the Constructivist trajectory toward collective production and reception.”51 It is also worth adding, however, that literalism itself helped to precipitate historical inquiry into Russian Constructivism, which in turn helped to open up, for the very first time, the depth and extent of Rodchenko’s Productivist (rather than laboratory) achievements for later artists, critics, and historians.

Post-Modular

Weathering the vicissitudes of both literalism and Minimalism over the past four decades, Andre continues to pursue a modular procedure in sculpture and poetry alike. Neither his precursor nor his contemporary, however, had such sta- mina or desire. Both Rodchenko and Stella abandoned their modular economies very early on, though perhaps not as straightforwardly as has usually been thought. I want to explore Rodchenko’s case through a reading of a famous photograph of the artist taken in his studio in Moscow around 1922 by Mikhail Kaufman, who is best known today as the camera-operator for his brother, the documentary ﬁlmmaker Dziga Vertov, and as a co-founder of the Kinoki production collective. The photograph dates to a year or so after Rodchenko’s September 1921 declaration of the three primary colors—a rigorous interior logic if there ever was one—and his subsequent commitment to a productivist platform in con- cert with his fellow Constructivists. This new platform demanded that the Constructivists abandon their laboratory inquiry—the enterprise within which

50. Andre, Cuts, p. 229. 51. Hal Foster, “Some Uses and Abuses of Russian Constructivism,” in Art into Life: Russian Constructivism, 1914–1932 (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery of the University of Washington, 1990), pp. 248–49.

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Rodchenko’s modular and deductive principles had arisen—and enter instead into the realm of industrial production itself. Staging himself as someone like an industrial worker, Rodchenko models the prototype of a boilersuit of his own design, one of his ﬁrst forays into the realm of utilitarian, function-specific production clothing proposed for work- ers by the Bolshevik government.52 His original sketch for the production suit exaggerates its geometric and linear stylization almost to the point of carica- ture, a genre of humorous illustration to which the artist often had recourse. But the suit is also pragmatic, with leather trim and double-stitching found in all the places where excessive wear might be expected, especially on the tool-holding pockets. Despite adopting a slight contrapposto, which he accentu- ates by the gesture of his left arm and Above: Mikhail Kaufman. Untitled. 1922. hand, Rodchenko plants his well-booted Below: Dziga Vertov. Still from a Kino Pravda feet four-square upon the ground. newsreel, with Rodchenko’s No. 15 (1921) One of the implied but at the same repurposed as an intertitle. 1922. time unlikely functions of Kaufman’s photograph was to solicit red factory managers, within the newly competitive economy of the NEP (New Economic Policy), to launch Rodchenko’s boilersuit prototype into production. But how do we interpret the conspicuous presence, within this productivist scenario, of the dismantled components of three of Rodchenko’s second series of spatial constructions—I refer to the accumulation of perimeter elements (circles, squares, and triangles) that appears to cascade from upper right to lower left? Their

52. This and the next two paragraphs are based on my essay “Modelli al lavoro,” in Tempo Moderno: Da Van Gogh a Warhol: Lavoro, macchine, e automazione nelle arti del Novecento, ed. Germano Celant (Milan: Skira, 2006), pp. 9–16.

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presence would seem far from random. One interpretation would be that the artist was simply advertising his new commitment to a productivist future by literally hang- ing up the detritus of his recent past: the dismantled modular components signifying the dismantling of the enterprise of laboratory Constructivism itself. But I am not so convinced; after all, Rodchenko had asserted that with these spatial works he had “set an obligatory condition for the future constructor of industry: ‘Nothing accidental, [nothing] unaccounted for.’” A more compelling interpretation of the photograph would suggest that it solicits more than a red factory manager willing to take a gamble on a boilersuit: that it solicits, in fact, the repurposing or refunctioning of the spatial constructions themselves. Given that a fundamental aspect of their design was the capacity to move back and forth between plane and space, their collapsed state should be understood as a positive rather than negative condition, their very physical trans- mutability signifying the possibility of their future. Despite all its instrumental rhetoric to the contrary there remained something open-ended about the productivist platform, as I have tried to argue elsewhere,53 an open-endedness that I believe is registered in this photograph. Rodchenko, for example, was already busy at precisely this time repurposing his modular spatial constructions to serve as titles and intertitles in Vertov’s Kino-Pravda documentary newsreels of 1922, for which Kaufman was the camera operator. We may compare No. 15 (1921) from the third series, for example, with its later deployment in an intertitle segment where it rotated on its own axis, with the phrases “From the one side” and “From the other side” alternating on the screen as it did so. Such open-endedness further accords with Rodchenko’s later emphasis on modularity and multifunctionality in his teaching of furniture design at the VKhUTEMAS, the Higher State Artistic and Technical Workshops in the later 1920s, which resulted in projects such as a fully collapsible and retractable bookshelf by his student, one comrade Bykov. In other words, the constructions have a place in the productivist future of the boilersuit, the photograph seems to suggest, through the refunctioning of the modular unit for a collective future. Stella’s rejection of his modular economy is complicated by the simultane- ously literalist and illusionist claims of his work after about 1962: as James Meyer notes, for every literalist painting (the Purple series, the Notched V series), there appears to be also a near contemporaneous illusionist antidote (Concentric Squares, Mitred Mazes). And that is before one even gets to the competing critical claims made about his early work over the course of the past four decades or more (“the struggle for Stella’s soul,” as Fried once put it).54 But his deﬁnitive break with the

53. See Gough, The Artist as Producer. 54. See Discussions in Contemporary Culture 1, ed. Hal Foster (Seattle: Bay Press, 1987), pp. 79; and Michael Fried, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), note 67, pp. 70–71. For a lucid analysis of both interpretations, see Meyer, Minimalism, pp. 119–27. For stimulating recent discussions that develop the antiliteralist reading in interesting new directions, see Harry Cooper, “What You See and What He Said,” in Frank Stella 1958,

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stripe module came in early 1966, with his Irregular Polygons, a series of forty-four eccentrically shaped geometric paintings of unbroken color fields, executed with fluorescent alkyd and epoxy pigments. In Moultonboro III, the third color variation of one of the eleven basic configurations in the series, a yellow triangle interpene- trates a red square, each shape fortified by an eight-inch band in either a contrasting hue or a contrasting tone. In the midst of working on this new series, Stella participated in a three-day symposium on “The Current Moment in Art,” organized by the San Francisco Art Institute in April 1966. On opening night, he spoke on a panel composed of Geldzahler, Roy Lichtenstein, and Larry Poons, while Harold Rosenberg gave the keynote address in which he differentiated and valorized heroic Abstract Expressionism from and over the so-called affirmative, IBM-society painting of Stella and other “new abstract” painters. In a workshop-style conversation between Stella and the critic Philip Leider conducted the next day before an audience of about twenty artists, curators, and critics, Stella characterized his new Irregular Polygons as having to do with “a penetration idea using borders,”55 making a quick illustrative sketch in the upper right of the blackboard of Chocorua and Moultonboro, the two simplest configurations within the series.

pp. 67–91; and also Jeffrey Weiss, “Radiator,” paper presented at “Stella from the Start,” Harvard University Art Museums, April 10, 2006. 55. Frank Stella, in conversation with Philip Leider at “The Current Moment in Art” symposium, San Francisco Art Institute. Leider had requested that he be “paired” with Stella for the workshop component of the symposium (see Philip Leider to Fred Martin, December 12, 1965, San Francisco Art Institute Archives). My thanks to Jeff Gunderson, Chief Librarian and Archivist at SFAI, for tracking down the symposium ﬁles. Unless otherwise noted, all remaining quotations from Stella are drawn from this audio recording and/or transcript (the latter courtesy of Caroline A. Jones).

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Astonishing his audience, especially Leider, Stella made an extraordinary claim: “My work represents absolutely no break with Abstract Expressionism,” he announced. “It’s a totally evolutionary situation, and . . . I can diagram it for you,” which he then preceded to do, chalking on the blackboard everything from the 1958 box-and-stripe and the Astoria-like “one-color” solution, to the 1959 rectilin- ear black painting, to the 1961 Benjamin Moore series, etc., explaining, while he did so, that the strong dependency on a modular economy in all of this work—which might seem to be antagonistic to Abstract Expressionism—was in fact a direct evolution from it. As he put it, the modular unit of the deductive structure was something he had been forced into because he “wanted to make essentially direct painting,” and, as a result, he “[had gotten] into organizational problems, design problems, that led [him] to get into things about the perimeter.” The Irregular Polygons, on the other hand, represented a “situation” that he had gotten into in order to escape precisely those constraints: “I felt I didn’t want to retain this kind of modular format [anymore], or even this kind of thinking about painting.” Instead, “I wanted to go back to an area of gesture or an area of picture-making that had more room.” Hence, the Irregular Polygons. Sure, he admitted, “there’s left- over space, conventional pictorial space, but it doesn’t bother me that much.” But Stella’s comments at the blackboard go much further than simply a rejection of the modular unit. More radically, he insists that the stripes were in fact never modules in the ﬁrst place: the stripes are “not really modules” because “they’re actually painted, and I feel them or experience them in that way, in other words, I start in one place and I move across it. It just goes like that.” Made in time, by the movement of the painter’s body across the extension of the canvas, the stripes are not units but painterly gestures. This is the exact opposite of the literalist

Stella at “The Current Moment in Art” symposium. 1966. San Francisco Art Institute Archives.

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interpretation, which is pretty much as Andre put it in 1984: “The prevailing convention of abstract painting in 1959 was gestural and rhythmic. Frank set off in an entirely different direction—neutralizing gesture by using uniform brushstrokes that trace a metrical pattern over the whole canvas. By increments of identical gestures the ground of the canvas was transformed into the field of the painting.”56 Thus, if the 1960 Pratt sheet of sketches had defined the development of his painting in terms of the struggle with relationality, the 1966 San Francisco Art Institute blackboard redrew that same development as a struggle for painterly gesture. Stella’s desire to disentangle himself from the modular economy that he himself had introduced seems prompted by an anxiety about being confused with a literalism that was, by 1966, everywhere in evidence in the numerous high- profile shows then being devoted to Minimalist work such as Primary Structures (1966). In his SFAI workshop, for example, Stella makes no mention of Andre, who has finally come well and truly into his own as a contributor to many of those exhibitions, but when an audience member asks Stella whether he thought that what Donald Judd was currently doing was “roughly what you’re doing,” Stella replies: “I don’t see . . . Judd’s sculpture that way, but I don’t know how I see Judd’s sculpture. I mean I could say I like it and it bothers me, that’s about as far as I can go right now. I try not to think about it actually, as much as I can.” But there is a second, and arguably longer-standing, anxiety that is at work in Stella’s defection from the modular, namely, hard-edge geometric abstraction, with which his work had been—and was continuing to be—sometimes conflated. This conflation was not without foundation, as Stella saw it. While the the modular format had resolved the problem of the perimeter, it had, in the course of doing so, introduced a new problem: “the painting edge was less soft, less rough,” especially in the Aluminum, Copper, and Purple paintings, which, Stella regretted, “began to take on a harder-edged look. And that wasn’t necessarily what I wanted. . . . I began to get into things which I thought began to look like what the critics said they were, which was not very appetizing. They began to look hard-edged, geometric in a bad sense. Dull and forced.” As a result, “[y]ou get yourself into what is really geometrical—the real problems with abstract painting as it developed, say, through Mondrian, [and] all kinds of Constructivist and Bauhaus painting. I never liked that painting and I didn’t want to do that painting. I wanted a direct, open, painterly and pictorial thing . . . painterly but direct. You know, really simple: thinking about things like de Kooning, and Newman, and Rothko, and things like that.” This second anxiety had a longer history than that pertaining to Minimalism’s swallowing up of literalism; its first sustained articulation is heard in the famous group interview with Bruce Glaser of February 1964,57 a disavowal that predates all

56. Andre, Cuts, p. 271. 57. Bruce Glaser (moderator), Dan Flavin, Don Judd, and Frank Stella, “New nihilism or new art” (recorded February 15, 1964; broadcast WBAI, March 24, 1964; distributed by Paciﬁca Radio Archives, Los Angeles). A very substantially edited version of the discussion was published by Lucy Lippard in ARTnews in 1966, and is reprinted in Minimalism, ed. Gregory Battcock (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 148–64.

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the major Minimalist shows. In the course of the interview, Stella struggles to fend off being lumped together with geometric abstraction, especially of the post–Max Bill school variety, which he derides as “a kind of curiosity—very dreary.”58 In order to do so, Stella rehearses his Pratt Institute attack on relational painting but with much greater vehemence, at least some of which may be attributed to the way in which Glaser had set up the interview, taunting his interviewees (besides Stella also present were Judd and Dan Flavin) with an extended prologue about an ambitious show of international geometric abstraction that had just opened at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York, The Classic Spirit in 20th Century Art.59 The exhibition was divided into three generational parts: “Pioneers,” “Middle Generation,” and “Younger Artists.” Stella was represented in the third part by a 12-by-12 inch Benjamin Moore painting, New Madrid. But among the middle generation painters, implicitly posited and inevitably construed as the father ﬁgures to the younger artists, was the Swiss-born, Italian-trained, and U.S.-based geometric abstract painter Fritz Glarner, who was represented by Relational Painting Tondo No. 3 (1945). A member of Abstraction-Création in the 1930s and a founding member of the American Abstract Artists group since 1936, Glarner had explicitly adopted the expression “Relational Painting” from the French to describe all of his own work since the 1940s. So much does Stella want to push the issue of execution that he even acknowledges that his own modular solutions to the problem of the framing edge—his “patterns”—had already been discovered in France in the 1950s by François Morellet.60 But so what, he adds; after all, it is not the composition that counts but the mode of its execution. In other words, design counts for Stella, but by 1964 execution counts even more: “I am a soft-edge geometric painter,” he declares in another context the same year.61 Thus, if Andre went on to shore up a lifetime interest in the modular unit, identifying with Rodchenko and other Constructivists along the way, he was not the only one to have found a purpose for it. For purpose takes many forms: when Rodchenko abandons the modular procedure in the wake of his declaration of the death of painting in late 1921, he does so in order to repurpose it for industrial and cinematic production. When Stella unequivocally reneges on the modular in early 1966, he does so in order to resolve a crisis wrought by his own literalism, and his subsequent desire to return to what he perceives to be the free- dom of high modernist painting. Transforming the modular back into painterly gesture, Stella thereby sutures the fundamental rupture that we have come to think of as punctuating his trajectory. (Or, in the light of Frank Stella 1958, he is

58. Ibid., p. 149. 59. Glaser et al., “New Nihilism or New Art” (audio recording). 60. Ibid. 61. Frank Stella to Alan Solomon, n.d. [March 1964?], emphasis added. See Getty Research Institute, Special Collections and Visual Resources, Barbara Rose Papers, inv. no. 9300100, box 5, folder 24. In the letter, Stella contests Solomon’s selection of American painters for the Venice Biennale that summer (including himself, though he declined to participate) as entirely dealer-driven: “What am I doing strand- ed in the Pop Art jungle?” he demands to know. The letter is in draft, and it is unclear if it was ever sent.

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simply drawing another trajectory out of the myr- iad possibilities contained within his ﬁrst substantial body of work.) In both cases, latent possibilities came to the fore, their emergence not inevitable but rather triggered by acute problems in the respective historical moments of each artist. For Stella, that problem was the future of painting; for Rodchenko, it was the future of art.

Epilogue

Moving forward yet at the same time looping back to the beginning, I would like to close with a Polaroid taken around 1967 in the new living space of Stella and Rose, a loftlike environment on Jones Street in the West Village.62 Complementing its modernist furniture in leather and chrome is a fully carpeted built-in modular stacked seating area cum play space for their young children, designed by the painter’s friend Richard Meier, who was responsible for the renovation.63 Lining the walls, in apparent confirmation of Stella’s newfound or refound conviction, are transcendent optical fields of pure color stained into unprimed canvas— Morris Louis, Ray Parker, Poons, and others now perhaps less well known. All painterly, all direct. Yet sitting on the discreet shelving unit just behind Le Corbusier’s chaise is Andre’s Timber Spool Exercise, a near-solitary souvenir of Stella and Andre’s early literalist adventure in a space otherwise almost entirely given over to optical pleasure. As mentioned at the outset, however, this mid-1959 sculpture represents a liminal moment in Andre’s production, between the Ladders and the Pyramids, between hand-carving and modular stacking. In other words, within Stella’s 1966 interpretation of the modular unit as painterly gesture, Timber Spool Exercise, significantly, still bears the trace of a cut, a stroke—a gesture—rather than being merely, literally, itself, a weathered stump of painted lumber.

62. Photographer unknown; see Getty Research Institute, Special Collections and Visual Resources, Barbara Rose Papers, inv. no. 9300100, box 5, folder 23. 63. See Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Rizzoli International, 1995), pp. 110–11.

Anonymous. Rose and Stella’s Jones Street living space, designed by Richard Meier. ca. 1967. Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California (930100). Courtesy Barbara Rose.

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