Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

In this study [fig. 1], both center colors are precisely the same color. However, being unable to actually see this, we demonstrate clearly, with colors, that we rarely see what we see. —Josef Albers, Search Versus Re-Search

My is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there.... What you see is what you see. —, in Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd”

In 1958 Frank Stella made a crude object that was tucked within a rough strip frame, an assemblage of two scraps of cardboard conspicuously nailed to four wooden boards, two of which visibly protrude beneath the cardboard (fig. 2, plate 32). Slathered in pink, red, and orange paint, the thing bears what is arguably a pictorial composition, but like its support, it seems so casually put together that we wonder whether these areas of color have not been routinely assembled rather than artfully composed. We can clearly see a seam between the two individual pieces of cardboard and in the lower, larger section, notchlike cuts in what must have originally been an ordinary box, now folded flat. Two parallel vertical folds score the surface of both pieces of cardboard, fig 1. Josef Albers, Color Study for Simultaneous Contrast, Plate IV-3 from The Interaction of Color which are arranged to preserve the continuity of these lines across the gap between the (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963). pieces: this precision seems at odds with the otherwise coarse, somewhat provisional manufacture of the piece. The painted forms cover both folds and seam, uniting the surface in a makeshift, unstable manner and turning the internal edges into diMerent species of lines. The upper register of this assembly consists of several sketchily rendered alternating orange and pink stripes, a symmetrical arrangement that is bracketed at top and bottom by orange. Below this is a vertically oriented red rectangle that appears to rest on a pink field. Or perhaps the area is simply another flat stripe pattern, rotated ninety degrees and magnified to a larger scale: two squat, pink stripes buttressing a red one. Or does the red block carry an allusive charge, suggesting a kind of doorway that promises a space behind the pink bands that frame it?

(opposite): fig 2. Frank Stella, Them Apples, plate 32. Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

At the base of this oM-center red rectangle the horizontal stripes resume, this time one of Cézanne’s signature still lifes of apples that it with alternating bands of red and orange. The spatial ambiguities of this set of stripes throws us into a kind of epistemological crisis: Is this echo those of the upper set. We might read the upper orange stripes as resting on top of thing a painting or a mere thing, a work of art or the pink field, yet the facture of the paint—its drips and brushwork—shows that the a useless object?2 pink is physically layered over the orange. Likewise, in the lower striped segment, the Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. As we shall orange stripes appear to slip behind red stripes, which stand out because they are see the question of whether we should understand a contiguous with the large block of red. Yet these orange stripes also seem to come forward painting as a work of art or as an ordinary object became by virtue of having been painted over what were once light pink bands. (To complicate a central topic of in the 1960s, shortly after matters, the horizontal pink stripes at the top are painted over red bands, and the ver- Them Apples was painted. Certainly, Stella’s own most tical pink areas in the middle are painted over a white ground, hindering our ability to famous works—his Black of 1958–60 and his recognize that they are the same pink and prompting us to imagine earlier but not various Metallic series (the Aluminum and Copper paint- fully obliterated color relationships.) Indeed, we begin to doubt whether the orange ings of 1960–61 and the Purple paintings of 1963)— sandwiched between the pink and red stripes is even the same color. The whole painted seemed to address this issue: the former with their aus- surface thus becomes a play of simultaneous contrast (showing the way one color will tere monochromaticity and the latter with their gaudy, change when it abuts diMerent colors), which works against color change caused by repellent sheen and shaped canvases (figs. 3, 4).

fig 3. Frank Stella, Jill, 1959. Enamel on canvas, material overlayering—or, more simply, it is a study of the way colors interact across a Such works could be equally convincing as traditional 7 ft. 6 3/8 in. x 6 ft. 6 3/4 in. (229.6 x 200 cm). surface as opposed to the way they interact in physical depth. paintings that contained a measure of pictorial space M Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Bu alo, N.Y. Gift of The lower stripe pattern rests on a thick band of pink. This pink is richer and red- and as objects that obdurately existed within the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., 1962. der than that of the pink stripes above, so much so that using pink to describe these literal space of their beholders alongside other non- stripes could be called into question. This pink area can be read in two ways: as a lintel art objects. In his study of , James Meyer resting on two posts of the same color (the assembled nature of the support reinforces characterized Stella’s practice as “schizophrenic,” one this reading, with the “lintel” rendered in cardboard and the “posts” made of wood) that, for the period from his Black paintings from late or as a single inverted U-shape framing a small, boxlike compartment containing four 1958 to the Irregular Polygons of 1966–67 (his first series amorphous painted forms.1 These ill-defined forms are nestled on a plane that physi- to abandon the allover stripe pattern; see fig. 5), was cally exists behind the painted cardboard surface, on one of the wooden trusses holding able to straddle the increasingly opposed purposes of the construction together: no shifting play between figure and field is imaginable pictorial illusionism and sculptural literalism.3 These here. The forms consist of four smudgy circular patches of red, pink, and orange (with series were enlisted both by critics who preferred to see some daubs of blue), and they seem to illustrate the title Stella gave the object, Them such work as the apogee of a specific modernist tradi- Apples. This title raises the question as crudely put as these painted “apples” them- tion and by a new generation of artists who sought to fig 4. Frank Stella, Six Mile Bottom, 1960. selves: “How d’ya like them apples?” Both the implied query and the four dirty smears claim it for a burgeoning literalist practice that treated Metallic paint on canvas, 9 ft. 8 in. x 5 ft. 11 1/2 in. of paint challenge the viewer to make a judgment of taste about an object so unlike this tradition as exhausted. (300 x 180 cm). Tate Gallery, London.

2 3 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

Michael Fried, one of Stella’s closest friends at Princeton and afterward, reflected in As for Stella’s thick stretchers, many have argued that this device makes his works 1987 on the diMerence between his own commitment to modernist painting as a young more objectlike. Stella claimed, however, that he appreciated the way oMsetting a critic and the materialist sensibility of Stella’s erstwhile studio partner, the sculptor Carl canvas from the wall emphasized its surface over its mass, making the painting flatter; Andre: “In a sense Carl Andre and I were fighting for [Stella’s] soul, and Andre and I rep- he even suggested an ideal viewing position to enable the beholder to better appreciate resented very diMerent things....We have to see it as a conflictual time...when diMerent the optical eMect: “When it’s set up on the wall, it seemed to us [Stella and Walter possibilities were entertained, when the same body of work was seen in diMerent ways.” Darby Bannard], rather than become an object...it actually emphasized more of the sur- Yet Fried himself has noted that his position and Andre’s minimalism have common roots face quality of it....When you look at the painting—and this is the only way I like my in the of —suggesting that both sides were coming from paintings to be looked at, really dead-on, because they’re conventional works of art in the same place but going in diMerent directions, that this “fight” was not so clear-cut.4 that sense, dead-on (I don’t like the angled views, the wide-angle lens shot)—when Stella most famously expressed his literalist sensibility in a 1964 interview con- you see the painting the way you’re supposed to see it...that little bit of depth just gives ducted by Bruce Glaser that also included Dan Flavin and Donald Judd. There he said you almost a shadow or some kind of breathing around the edge that gives you all of that his ambition was to “keep the paint as good as it was in the can”—“to get the the surface. You don’t get so much of a sense of the thing hanging on the wall.”8 paint out of the can and onto the canvas” with as little intervention and inflection as Illusion surfaces even in the Black paintings, works that would seem to disavow it 5 fig 5. Frank Stella, Tuftonboro IV, 1966. Fluorescent possible. He found a receptive audience in Andre, who, at his urging, began to make entirely, suggesting that, despite the rhetorical conflict in Stella’s work between materi- alkyd and epoxy paint on canvas, 8 ft. 3 in. x 9 ft. 1 in. sculpture by presenting or arranging combinations of raw materials rather than working alism (or literalism) and pictorialism, one is latent within the other. Gottfried Boehm, (251.5 x 276.9 cm). Gift of the artist (PA 1954), Addison 6 Art Drive, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips them into something new. Yet however literal Stella’s presentation of paint and can- relishing the Black paintings’ hybrid nature as Bild-Dinge (image-things), points out that Academy, Andover, Mass., 1991.95. vas, he never went as far as not painting—he did not tack up a blank canvas or exhibit the material facture of Stella’s brushwork, following the direction of the stripe, aMects cans of paint. As Thierry de Duve argued, Greenberg, when confronted with Stella’s the appearance of the single color, refracting it into matte and shiny areas and thereby Black series, was forced to consider whether a blank canvas could legitimately lay claim suggesting pictorial depth in their surfaces. This eMect is reinforced by the patterned to being a work of art, specifically a good work of art. The overture Stella’s abstraction compositions, which generate the optical illusion of diagonals that run through the made to brute materiality led Greenberg to withhold his endorsement of the young angles of the repeating stripes, so that in the canvases that sport a rectilinear pattern we painter and prompted him to rethink his aesthetic criteria—and it made the artist him- also see chevrons, and in the diamond-patterned paintings, cruciform gridlines.9 self rather uncomfortable as well. Indeed, in the interview with Glaser, Stella denies Yet this mutual imbrication of materiality and illusion was not invented with Stella’s his paintings’ materiality: “I lose sight of the fact that my paintings are on canvas, even Black paintings. It was there from the start as the linchpin of Stella’s practice in 1958, in a though I know I’m painting on canvas, and I just see my paintings. I don’t get terribly way that cannot be accurately characterized as schizophrenic or conflicted. With renewed hung up over the canvas itself. If the visual act taking place on the canvas is strong attention, the 1958 works can help us reconsider Stella’s Black paintings in more nuanced enough, I don’t get a very strong sense of the material quality of the canvas. It sort of terms. Shortly after painting Them Apples, before an agonistic relationship between picto- disappears. I don’t like things that stress the material qualities. I get so I don’t even rialism and literalism had been fully articulated, Stella made another cardboard-and- like Ken Noland’s paintings (even though I like them a lot). Sometimes all that bare can- wood assemblage (fig. 6, plate 33). The dimensions of this untitled work are not the same vas gets me down, just because there’s so much of it; the physical quality of the cotton as those of Them Apples, but they are close, and here we find the same materials, duck gets in the way.”7 the same hues, the same composition, the same assembly—but not exactly the same. fig 6. Frank Stella, Untitled, plate 33.

4 5 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

On first glance, the two works appear to be mirror images. Both display a rela- Rather than follow Guberman and see this pair as a failed expression of the tively top-heavy banded area of alternating colors oMset by a narrower register of a “flatness” that Stella’s Black paintings would later achieve, I believe that these two works similar stripe pattern below. The central areas of both have a red “door” sandwiched exhibit the beginnings of a corrective repetitiveness that underlies his later preference between two thick pink areas. The red rectangle in Them Apples drifts toward the left for working in series: what is being “corrected” is the relationship between the image edge of the support and its analogue in the untitled assemblage toward the right. and its material density, specifically as it was manifested in the early work of Jasper But this mirroring is not carried through completely: whereas the pink and orange Johns. In their proximity to ordinary things, these works were both attractive to and stripes appear at the top of Them Apples and the red and orange stripes at the bot- traumatic for Stella. Although Stella’s 1958 paintings and constructions exhibit a clear debt tom, the reverse is true in the untitled work, suggesting a 180-degree inversion. In to Johns, over the course of that year Stella took a number of corrective measures other respects, the two works seem to be neither inversions nor reflections of each against his own works’ flirtation with their status as things. This is evident in the most other but carbon copies: the untitled piece flaunts the same vertical cardboard folds striking diMerence between Them Apples and its untitled counterpart: the “apples” in slightly disrupting the smooth application of paint across the surface, and it has a their physical niche have disappeared in the untitled assemblage, where the wooden cluster of dried drips in roughly the same spot in the upper striped register on the support is hidden from view by an additional piece of cardboard, painted a uniform far right. Yet certain diMerences also work against our initial recognition of reflection, orange. I suspect that Stella is resisting, even hiding, the assemblage mode that is so inversion, and copy. In Them Apples, for example, the parallel vertical folds in the striking in Them Apples. How he does so, and what this means for his subsequent work cardboard divide the composition into roughly equal thirds, and the right edge of the and its contentious critical reception, lies at the heart of the story of Stella’s work in 1958. rectangle is almost aligned with the right fold; in the untitled work, the same near- I am proposing that Them Apples precedes the untitled work though in fact the alignment occurs, but the folds and thus the rectangle have shifted to the right. exact chronology of the distinct yet unprogrammatic, unplanned, and fundamentally These “found” folds in the recycled cardboard undermine the reflection between the nonserial body of work that Stella produced in 1958 is impossible to reconstruct. Rather two compositions and undo their mutual symmetry in the central section, where it than mourn the loss of what would surely have been interesting information—particularly otherwise seems strongest. given the sheer number and stunning variety of paintings he made in this one year Until now, the only commentator to have invited a comparison between these (more than thirty)—I shall consider these works in family groups.11 These groups and their two works is Stella’s college friend Sidney Guberman in his 1995 biography of the artist: proposed rough sequence are based on whatever hard evidence can be assembled in “In lectures at Pratt in January 1960, Stella explained the scheme to achieve the tandem with two guiding considerations: the relationship between the 1958 work and appearance of flatness. The first part was symmetry, but that was not enough to achieve the Black paintings and Stella’s rapport with the work of Johns. what he was after. If, for example, he were to paint Them Apples, twice identically, These works from 1958 have long remained in the shadow of the Black paintings, side by side, each one being the mirror image of the other, he would have had symme- as many commentators, often encouraged by Stella himself, have insisted on an evo- try but not the flatness because there would remain the problem of the illusion of lutionary development from these early striped works to his serial practice. While I am depth generated by all of the variations in color, value, and paint thickness. To achieve loath to view Stella’s 1958 paintings only as premonitions of his later series, there is a flatness use one color, one value, and apply the paint evenly over the entire surface. great deal that the Black paintings can tell us about these early pieces, and we should Hand in hand with symmetry would be the creation of paintings of parallel black stripes, therefore include the later work in our investigations. The artist finished 1958, the first all stripes basically the same in width and paint density.”10 year of his mature work, with the first three paintings of his first series, each of which

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has a claim to be the “first” Black painting. This indeterminate origin strikes at the sons were as much about making objects as designing images.”14 My aim is to carry this heart of Stella’s mythic genesis, casting doubt on another accepted critical understanding object lesson through the entire body of 1958 work, beyond the assemblages to which of the Black paintings as constituting a radical break in the history of art. Keeping the Jones refers, to show how Stella reworked his relationship to Johns and to the opaque seriality of the Black paintings in view, I shall consider the paintings of 1958 as twins or materiality of his own paintings. Stella’s paintings from 1958, in addition to providing triplets and discuss their critique of singularity and, more broadly, of artistic originality a critique of originality, exposed in advance what would soon become a commonplace itself, a critique that proved foundational for Stella’s serial work. In 1958 Stella sought critical fallacy—that art, and Stella’s art in particular, had to be either “modernist” or artistic originality in the wake of the abstract expressionists and their followers; at the “literal,” pictorial or thingly. same time he consciously exposed this ambition as a vain one. By exploring this simultaneous akrmation and disavowal of originality, we can enrich our understanding of Stella’s serial work without marginalizing the early pieces. Becoming an Artist fig 7. Jasper Johns, Flag, 1954–55. Encaustic, oil, and on fabric mounted on plywood, three , writing on the occasion of the artist’s retrospective at The Museum I have always felt it is much better to...paint things that exist in themselves and do panels, 42 1/4 in. x 5 ft. 5/8 in. (107.3 x 153.8 cm). of in 1970, astutely remarked on Stella’s ambivalence toward artistic origi- not carry the mind back to some object upon which they depend for their existence.... The , New York. Gift of Philip nality. Rubin considered the repetitive character of Stella’s striped patterns a sign of this I would like to make something that is real in itself, that does not have to be Johnson in honor of Alfred H. Barr, Jr. ambivalence, attributing his stripe motif to the stimulus of Johns’s Flag (1954–55; fig. explained—like the letter A for instance. 7). While Johns’s American flag is a notable example of an artist curbing his originality, —Arthur Dove, in Barbara Haskell, Arthur Dove Rubin identifies Flag as an influence purely because it, like much of Stella’s work, has stripes. Given the tendency of Stella’s critics to consider the 1958 work a mere preface to Stella received his first formal art training between fall 1950 and spring 1954 at Phillips the Black series, the repetition embodied in Flag’s stripe pattern becomes the source Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, a private high school renowned for both its art for Stella’s suppression of a uniquely inspired gesture, rather than evidence of a shared program and its museum, the Addison Gallery of American Art. He studied painting and fig 8. Thomas Eakins, Professor Henry A. Rowland, 1897. Oil on canvas, 6 ft. 8 1/4 in. x 4 ft. 6 in. 12 interest of the two artists in “found” imagery. Furthermore, Rubin credits Johns with art history under Patrick Morgan, who, with his wife, Maud, had been a pupil of Hans (203.8 x 137.2 cm). Gift of Stephen C. Clark, Esq., Stella’s total integration of his motif with the support (that is, “deductive structure”). Hofmann in Munich. Maud Morgan taught at Abbot Academy, then the sister school to Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, This claim neglects not only Stella’s work before the majority of the Black paintings but Andover, and had shown with Betty Parsons Gallery and also worked with Alexander Andover, Mass., 1931.5. also Johns’s own predilection for working in assemblage. How do the plaster casts that Archipenko before she and her husband were invited to Andover.15 While Stella recalls at times abut his Targets exhibit “absolute identification of the motif with the shape of being impressed by the Addison’s collection, particularly The West Wind (1891) by Winslow the field”? Indeed, how could this claim even hold for the Targets themselves, such as Homer, Frederic Remington’s Moonlight, Wolf (c. 1909), and the gigantic portrait Pro- Green Target (1955), the first work by Johns that Stella saw firsthand, which is ensconced fessor Henry A. Rowland (1897; fig. 8) by Thomas Eakins, the Morgans’ private collection, in a rectangular frame?13 which they regularly opened to students, had greater appeal, especially their works Caroline Jones, in her survey of the 1958 paintings, intimated what Stella’s shift by Hofmann and Arthur Dove.16 of emphasis could mean: “The dense materiality of these painted cardboard objects Throughout his career Stella seems to have been fascinated by prewar American [for example, Them Apples] reminds the viewer that in this early period it was already abstraction, particularly by what he later considered to be its struggle with European crucial to Stella not to ‘be’ something but to ‘make’ something, and that Johns’s les- modernism. Under the sway of Clement Greenberg’s criticism, Stella would later subscribe

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to the thinking that abstract had successfully resolved its struggle with encounter with the collections of the Addison and the influence from Europe (that is, ) by developing a new approach to abstraction. How- Morgans: “I believe that access to abstraction to anyone ever, Dove, whose sense of scale Stella especially admired, had also tried to develop an born after 1936 is direct and unencumbered. One wants independent (Greenberg would call it “provincial”) mode of abstraction in both painting to do it and one does; it is that simple. If a young person and assemblage (fig. 9)—and we can recognize the importance of his alternative walks through a gallery of American painting in 1950 precedent for a young painter anxious about how his work would measure up against and confronts the work of Copley, Inness, Sargent, Eakins, the impressive accomplishments of both European and postwar American modernism. Remington, Homer, Dove, Hartley, Hofmann, Pollock, and As Stella recalled: “European painting was a tremendous problem for American painters, Kline, he will want to paint like Hofmann, Pollock, and for [Marsden] Hartley and Dove in particular, [and they] were the ones I most identified Kline, admiring Hartley and Dove for their proximity to with and seemed to me I was most moved by.”17 the former, and acknowledging the rest for their accom- Although Stella had had some interest in making art before attending Andover, he plishment and eMort in facing the task of art.”20 became earnest about painting there, in the art program’s “oasis of self-indulgence Although many critics consider his work a radical and pleasure.”18 Studio space was generous and materials were free and readily available. break with , Stella himself insisted Stella remembers that he “never had any qualms, for example, [about] building up a that his practice extended from it, self-consciously very large painting on a piece of cardboard,” and, indeed, much of his work at Andover revisiting certain of its fundamental principles—gestural followed Patrick Morgan’s method of working paint with a palette knife on board. He attack, allover composition, large scale—in order to cri- particularly liked the eMect of the cardboard showing through the applied paint, which tique them. He considered this critical reevaluation of he organized in discrete blocks, and he continued working with various layers of paint abstract expressionism necessary, even redemptive, given fig 9. Arthur Dove, Portrait of Alfred Stieglitz, 1924. fig 10. Frank Stella, Still Life, 1954. Oil on paper, Assemblage of lens, mirrored glass plate, springs, to engage the support in strategies of concealment and revelation at Princeton and the numerous painters working in the 1950s who rou- 18 x 24 in. (45.7 x 61 cm). Promised gift of the artist steel wool, glue, and nails mounted on board, then in New York. The abundant resources at Andover encouraged Stella to produce with- tinely copied the original “immediacy” of painters like (PA 1954), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips 15 7/8 x121/8 in. (40.3 x 30.8 cm). The Museum of Academy, Andover, Mass., PL2003. Modern Art, New York. Purchase. out hesitation: “If I didn’t like the way it came out...I had no hesitancy in scraping it and , thereby rendering all oM and throwing it away, and the sort of whole mechanics of waste, the whole what was once radical “mannered” or “academic.”21 mechanics of keeping working and getting what you wanted, sort of not nursing any- During his freshman year at Princeton, Stella thing, not worrying about anything, which I think was the one thing which carried me painted regularly on his own because the university did ...sort of helped me the most.”19 not have any art classes. The art history professor William Set the task of completing a still life assignment to qualify for the studio art C. Seitz, later the associate curator at The Museum of major his senior year, Stella committed to a decidedly abstract mode of execution. The Modern Art responsible for the Art of Assemblage (1961) resulting painting betrays his study of Seurat in art history courses as well as his avowed and Responsive Eye (1965) exhibitions, had set up an interest in Hofmann’s paint handling (fig. 10). Reflecting on this work as a “solution to informal extracurricular painting workshop in the exist- a problem,” Stella justified his lack of interest in working in a figurative mode as due to ing studio for architecture majors, and Stella joined this his having come of age during the heyday of abstract expressionism, as well as to his his sophomore year. Seitz had recently received his Ph.D.

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in art history from Princeton, writing his dissertation on abstract expressionism, which During Stella’s final year at Princeton, Fried had required the outside endorsement of Alfred Barr to win over a department hesitant became closer to Bannard, whose house was a regular about a topic concerning living artists. It was in Seitz’s studio class that Stella became meeting place for the three friends. As Stella recalls: close friends with the painter Walter Darby Bannard, two years his senior. The two “The basic thing that we did I think is something which engaged in an intense debate about painting, and their friendship was crucial for is very common with art students or young people who Stella’s work at Princeton and during his first years in New York.22 are interested in art. We pretty much went through what During Stella’s junior year, in the fall term of 1956, Stephen Greene took up his you could euphemistically call contemporary literature position as Princeton’s first resident artist; he was a figurative painter working in New I guess which would be essentially Arts and Art News. York who increasingly experimented in an abstract-expressionist mode. Stella’s own work And issue by issue, cover to cover, word by word, we had by then moved away from the more delicate cubist- and neo-impressionist-inspired went through what was going on at that particular time. palette-knife pieces he had been making and was instead heavily indebted to the work And that’s really all we had to go on. And what we of Kline, as evidenced in the covers he had done the year before for Nassau Lit, Prince- did was we would check out essentially what we read ton’s student literary magazine (fig. 11). It was at a Nassau Lit meeting when Stella was against what we saw. We’d go and see the shows. a sophomore that remembers being introduced to the artist by Thomas And that’s when we first became conversant with the Carnicelli, an editor of the magazine and Stella’s Princeton roommate and friend from writings of such people as Clement Greenberg, Hess, Andover. Fried, a freshman at the time, was studying English and writing poetry, and he Rosenberg and those kind of critical attitudes.”25 credits Bannard and Stella with initiating him into .23 Bannard graduated Fried was also in Greene’s painting class during fig 11. Cover of the November 1957 issue of in the spring of 1956 and moved to New York, where Stella often visited him during his this year, and through Greene he contacted Clement Nassau Lit, the Princeton student literary magazine, junior year. In the fall of 1957, Bannard returned to Princeton to work in a frame shop Greenberg. In the fall of 1958, after Stella had graduated with a painting by Frank Stella. owned by Larry Munson, which also served as the Little Gallery, a space that had exhib- and moved to New York, Greenberg came to Princeton to ited abstract-expressionist drawings and the art of many of Greene’s students. In this, deliver a series of six Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, his senior year, Stella became enamored of Johns’s work, and he developed an interest a prestigious forum open only to faculty and their guests. in assemblage. Bannard remembers Stella “coming around the gallery regularly for about Greenberg invited Fried to attend and asked Fried to fig 12. Darby Bannard and Frank Stella, 3 Cents, 1957.

two weeks because he was obsessed with buying 5&10–cent store trinkets for a huge introduce him to other interested peers; Fried brought Collage on paper, 11 1/2 x81/2 in. (29.2 x 21.6 cm). Darby ‘construction’ he was doing.” The two worked together on (fig. 12), and Stella Stella and Bannard, and the three heard Greenberg’s the- Bannard, Miami. made small assemblages, experimenting with the medium’s range of stylistic possibili- ories on modernist painting, its immanent self-critique, ties. Sometimes he privileged the geometric and abstract quality of the found material, and its privileging of “optical” sensation over tactility. as in Cricket/Kit Construction (1958, plate 30); at other times he gave precedence to the Greenberg also provided a narrative of the historical messy randomness of the material, as in an untitled assemblage akxed to a broken development of abstract painting in Europe and the painting easel (plate 31).24 In addition, Stella was designing sets for Princeton’s Theater United States, later presented in the essays of his Art and Intime; as Fried remembers it, Stella painted these in his gestural, Kline-inspired manner. Culture anthology, which he had been revising that year.26

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The high regard that Stella, Bannard, and Fried had for Greenberg appears to words, for an art that didn’t exist, so I had a very strong idea of what was absolutely have been unique for them—the vast majority of art writing at the time incited their the newest, most definite thing....I had never seen it, but yet it was a kind of palpable ire and sarcasm. Of particular fascination for Stella were the mechanisms of art-world reality...that was in the air. It was interesting to see it...when I did first see it in my publicity and notoriety, best represented by the recurring “[Name] Paints a Picture” life...so it was also interesting to hear about something, to be strongly reputed to be feature in Art News: good, and then actually to see it be good, was a little bit interesting.”27 Stella first saw Johns’s work in photographic reproductions, and he “began to Darby and I used to play a game[,] which was to decide what the be interested in Jasper on the level of an idea.” Through such photographs, he was most paintings were really like on the basis of what the people wrote struck by the stripe motif and its repetition in Johns’s Flag paintings; it was almost about them, and after a while by the last year in school you could impossible for him to get a sense of how their surfaces were painted and the tactile eMect easily chart three years, and how you were supposed to look at of their encaustic and collage. The first work by Johns that Stella saw in person was Green something...and I think it’s like some of the terrifically obvious Target (1955; fig. 13) in the 1957 group show Artists of the : Second Genera- examples where when (Name) showed at the Stable [Gallery], and all tion at the Jewish Museum in New York, during his junior year.28 When in 1958 Johns had of a sudden (Name) who was commonly reviewed in Art News about his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, Stella promptly went to see it.29 2 or 3 pages from the beginning of the [magazine] is suddenly in the In conjunction with a brief review of the exhibition by Fairfield Porter, Johns’s Target with fig 13. Jasper Johns, Green Target, 1955. Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas, 5 ft. x 5 ft. first pages of the reviews, and there’s a photograph, and now (Name) Four Faces graced the cover of the January issue of Art News (fig. 14), and in the caption (152.4 x 152.4 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, has a breakthrough of the overall battle collage, and it becomes very the editors compared the artist with his “better-known colleagues” , New York. Richard S. Zeisler Fund. complicated, very expert, very well done...and my feelings about , Allan Kaprow, and . This list reinforces Porter’s own attempt to things were developed to the point where...I began to feel very use Johns’s work to articulate an alternative trend to abstract expressionism and its sec- strongly about finding a way that wasn’t so wrapped up in the hulla- ond-generation Tenth Street progeny, whose style, he charged, “seems more and more to fig 14. Cover of the January 1958 issue of Art News baloo or a way of working that you couldn’t write about...something be a kind of naturalism, as European abstract painting was a kind of rationalism.”30 with Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955. that didn’t lend itself easily to being blown up, to being quickly Stella recalls that his last paintings at Princeton were “an amalgam of some kind overpromoted, something that was stable in a sense, something that of Jasper [Johns], [Adolph] Gottlieb and sort of [Mark] Rothko.” What he appears to wasn’t constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux. have valued in the work of the latter two was their compartmentalized pictorial organ- ization using repeating (but not necessarily identical) modules. Stella became less This game of determining “what the paintings were really like on the basis of what the interested in the kind of line used by Pollock or Kline—a line that refused to function as people wrote about them” demonstrates that the promotional media of art magazines a contour of some discrete form—preferring Gottlieb’s pictograms and Rothko’s floating were as crucial for Stella and his peers as were actual encounters with works of art rectangles of color: “That was the kind of thing I liked, which was sort of a big image, during their trips to New York. Stella recalls that for some time his exposure to Jasper sort of softly painted and with stripes and repetitional elements, repeated boxes, semi- Johns came only through rumors in the art history department at Princeton and, later centered motifs, with sort of a lot of landscape type divisions of kind of bands across on, from photographs he saw in Art News and Arts: “Already without having seen a the horizon and blank below, or a blank area with bands and the boxes in the bands, painting or even knowing where they were,...it was interesting to see a reputation in and boxes with stripes in them, floating on [a] big area.” In this description, we find

14 15 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

allusions to such paintings as Perfect Day for Banana Fish (plate 1), with its brushy, and his army physical was scheduled for September. Hollis Frampton, a photographer atmospheric paint handling and stacked rectangular forms; Plum Island (Luncheon on and filmmaker who had been Stella’s classmate at Andover, was sharing an apartment the Grass) (plate 3), as overt a landscape as Stella ever made; and Tundra (plate 2), the with Carl Andre and the composer Mark Shapiro on Mulberry Street, and during a visit only work where the box motif clearly displays stripes within its enclosure and whose to their apartment Stella met Andre for the first time. Andre, whose work would prove large, gray-blue field has an undeniable aknity with Rothko’s ambiguously floating foundational for minimalism in the coming decade, had been a year ahead of Stella at color areas. These three paintings are also the most idiosyncratic of the 1958 works—they Andover, yet they knew each other only by sight. In New York the two went to jazz clubs, have no clear pendants nor do they belong to a family group—which further suggests frequented the famous Cedar Bar, and scavenged for materials together. Andre recalled that they may have come early in the year, before Stella moved to New York and began that Stella’s small studio had been a jewelry shop, with a huge, cumbersome safe that working out problems of color and structure across several works.31 limited the working space still further.33 Stella graduated in June, with a degree in history and a senior thesis on the During the summer, presumably around the time of his army physical, Stella historical circumstances of stylistic change in medieval Celtic, Carolingian, and Ottonian returned to Andover for a lengthy visit, repeatedly dropping in on Gordon “Diz” Bensley, manuscript illustration (with passing references to modern artists like Paul Klee). He Morgan’s former teaching assistant, who had taken over the art program after Morgan moved to New York, where he began painting with enamel and tint colors, a pasty kind left earlier that year. Bensley recalls: “I had in the basement an easel set up with big of pigment used to tint batches of house paints. These paints were cheap and ensured poster paper...with lots of tempera paints there for our three-year-old, Jennifer. And I that he would have a wealth of material to work with: “It was like having a lot of oil came down after Frank left and saw all these paintings that looked just like Jennifer’s, paint, but you know for thirty-five cents you could get a quart of it, and you could do a and I figured, naturally she’d never pick up, a three-year-old, so I just threw them out. lot of painting with it.” He bought the paints on Essex Street, near his first studio on the And...there were dozens of them, just dozens of them, all over the place....And the Lower East Side at 5 Eldridge Street. Aiming for high volume at a low price, Stella next time Frank came to visit I happened to ask him what he was doing—was he oM bought the leftover paints that had not sold well, “seven or eight year old decorator visiting people? And he said ‘no no, I was down in the cellar painting—I discovered colors that had gone out of style.” As examples, he lists the purple-reds and chartreuses your daughter’s easel and I was having a ball!’” What is remarkable about this story is that are most strikingly evident in Red River Valley (plate 16), a work painted in the that Bensley, who had trained at Yale University and the Institute of Design in Chicago Eldridge Street studio, according to an inscription on the back of the canvas. Stella con- and taught at Andover for nearly a decade, could not distinguish Stella’s work from sidered these leftover, non-art paints as a kind of “found object”—a given that would that of his young daughter. The episode thus tacitly reiterates the trope of childlike limit the amount of personal choice, and perhaps responsibility, in his painting. Of execution that peppered accounts of Johns’s work as well, beginning with Porter’s Art course, he made choices—chartreuse and purple-red are roughly complementary and, as News review.34 The story also illustrates the speed with which Stella worked—evidently such, not a random combination. Yet by emphasizing extrinsic economic limitations generating a prodigious number of works on paper and canvas in a brief time. (his own and of the shops he frequented) over an artful combination of colors, he sug- gests in retrospect that his earliest New York works were, in part, the result of a chance operation that neutralized his unique, highly trained artistic subjectivity.32 The Limits of Painting Stella lived and worked at the Eldridge Street studio during the summer of 1958 Stella, to his surprise, failed his army physical: his left hand, injured in a childhood with the expectation that his time in New York would be limited: he had been drafted, accident, was unable to perform a simple opposable-thumb test. He returned to New

16 17 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

York in the fall and set up a studio at 366 West Broadway in the SoHo district, at that According to Duve, the Black paintings came close enough to a literal presenta- time a derelict neighborhood of vacant textile factories. Andre joined him there that tion of raw material to prompt Greenberg to revise his aesthetic theory. In order to winter and made sculpture as Stella was beginning the Black paintings, and the two justify his disregard for paintings that appeared to conform to his criteria, Greenberg worked closely together. Andre remembers his “ultimate carving” (fig. 15), as “a negative had to make a concession to the readymade—he had to allow the blank canvas Brancusi-like sculpture—even I call them ladders—and this was an endless column, to be a legitimate picture, not just a hypothetical limit for painting. The blank canvas except it was concave rather than convex. I was carving it in Stella’s studio on West could therefore function as a picture; what is more, it would be a picture without Broadway. He was admiring its face—it was carved only on one face, the other three faces any illusion, entirely “literal.” As Fried later recognized, “With respect to his under- were not carved. He looked at it approvingly, then walked around it and ran his hand standing of modernism Greenberg had no truer followers than the literalists [that down the back of the untouched side of the timber, which was about six feet tall, and is, minimalists].”37 said, ‘That’s sculpture too.’ And it was the side I hadn’t cut. I was very much annoyed For Fried the problem with minimalist objects, like the sculpture Andre was with that statement at the time and put it in the back of my mind and forgot about it. making when he described himself as under Stella’s tutelage, was that they were But my gradual development was to go away from cutting into the material—to use the not conflicted enough: “There are certain younger artists to whose sensibilities all material itself. So years later I recalled his prophetic remark.” This story calls to mind conflict between the literal character of the support and illusion of any kind is Greenberg’s statement in “After Abstract Expressionism” (1962) that a “stretched or tacked intolerable and for whom, accordingly, the future of art lies in the creation of works up canvas already exists as a picture—though not necessarily as a successful one”—an that, more than anything else, are wholly literal—in that respect going ‘beyond’ assertion that, in turn, was used to locate Stella’s paintings in the crossfire between painting. It should be evident that what I think of as literalist sensibility is itself a modernism and minimalism.35 product, or by-product, of the development of modernist painting itself—more accu-

fig 15. Carl Andre, Last Ladder, winter 1958–59. Wood, For Greenberg the modernist search for the essence of painting led to “flatness rately, of the increasingly explicit acknowledgement of the literal character of the fig 16. Dan Flavin, Icon IV (the pure land) (to David 6 ft. 11 1/2 in. x 6 in. x 6 in. (214 x 15.6 x 15.6 cm). Tate and the delimitation of flatness,” to what he believed was painting’s ambition for support that has been central to that development.” Fried implies that a literal pre- John Flavin, 1933–1962), 1962, reconstruction Gallery, London. Purchased 1972, T01533. two-dimensionality bounded within some kind of shape or frame. This condition sentation of materials demands the presence or at least the threat of illusionism in 1969. White formica with daylight fluorescent light, 4 ft. 2 in. x 44 in. x 11 in. (122.9 x 113 x 28.3 cm). was, at least initially for Greenberg, an unrealizable limit that actual paintings could order to be art, just as modernist illusionism demanded an acknowledgment of the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Purchased 1969. only asymptotically approach. As he wrote in “Modernist Painting” (1960): “The material limits of painting as central to its development. Minimalist objects follow flatness towards which Modernist painting orients itself can never be an absolute the same path as modernist paintings, but, like fallen angels, they have strayed from flatness....The first mark made on the canvas destroys its literal and utter flatness.” that path by being too much of one thing—too literal, to the exclusion of illusion.38 The illusion thus generated was inevitable, but it could be greatly reduced by While Stella never strayed so far as to follow the suggestion he gave to Andre, his being made “optical” rather than “sculptural” (mimetic). Two years later, in relin- Black paintings, especially, seem to come close to this goal. Yet they are never bla- quishing the necessity of any mark-making at all and accepting the blank canvas as tantly literal, never completely exclusive of illusion. Stella’s reluctance carries over, as a “picture—though not necessarily as a successful one,” Greenberg, as Thierry de we shall see, from his practice in 1958. On this point Dan Flavin, in the 1964 inter- Duve has shown, became a critic of quality per se, of a work’s “success” or failure in view with Glaser, rightly distinguished his point of view from that of Stella in that he general, outside the realm of its adherence to the historically determined partic- (with Judd) thought of “painting as [an] object, as a physical object, and I think ularities of a given medium.36 Frank is the farthest from that of us” (figs. 16, 17).39

18 19 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

If Stella expressed reservations about the object quality of paintings, he took an even higher premium on sheer visibility and an even lower one equal issue with repetition. In a 1966 interview with Alan Solomon, he noted that his on the tactile and its associations, which include that of weight as growing propensity for working with symmetrical arrangements of modular units indi- well as of impermeability. One of the most fundamental and unifying cated “not so much even repetition as a kind of directness.”40 Stella claimed to have emphases of the new common style is on the continuity and neu- learned the importance of repetition from his early exposure to photo reproductions of trality of a space which light alone inflects, without regard to the laws Johns’s Flag. The “directness” he sought in the 1960s banished any vestiges of com- of gravity....Arelated emphasis is on economy of physical substance. positional decision making, which still lingered even in Johns’s repetition. Whereas Johns This manifests itself in the pictorial tendency to reduce all matter to had limited his choices most narrowly with Flag (the composition of the American flag two dimensions—to lines and surfaces that define or enclose space is a given and, rare for Johns’s work, constitutes the entire image), the actual work but hardly occupy it. Rendering substance entirely optical, and betrays a myriad of decisions in his handling of the collage: the stars are cut carefully and form, whether pictorial, sculptural, or architectural, as an integral fig 17. Donald Judd, Untitled (“Record Cabinet”), 1963. appear embedded in the blue field, each stripe is an autonomous construction of part of ambient space—this brings anti-illusionism full circle. Light cadmium red oil on wood, 19 1/2 x301/2 x451/2 in. (49.5 x 77.5 x 115.6 cm). Collection Donald Judd newsprint pieces, and so on. The material eMect of Johns’s masterful collage work on the Instead of the illusion of things, we are now oMered the illusion of Estate. iconic repetition of Flag could have struck Stella only after he saw this and other works modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless, and in person—an experience, as we have seen, that prompted him to revise his previous exists only optically like a mirage. This kind of illusionism is stated understanding of Johns. in pictures whose paint surfaces and enclosing rectangles vibrate Stella continues to credit Johns with the lesson of repetition throughout his career, into the space around them; and in buildings that, apparently and latent within this lesson are traces of decision making in the art of assemblage formed of lines alone, seem woven into the air.42 and collage. Stella’s further revision of his position vis-à-vis Johns, away from repetition and toward directness, is an “antirelational” attitude that would fit well with Judd’s What Greenberg appears to be describing is a generic art, one that transcends, by way own views in the Glaser interview. Stella consistently described this directness as some- of “the new common style,” the limitations of specific media at the very moment it is thing that would go “right to your eye—something that you could see—that you could defined by them. This art is without mass; it is an art that almost appears to sublime see and something that you didn’t have to look around. You got the whole thing right into thin air. away....Once you saw it you understood it and it would have a direct eMect on your eyes, This move from the specific to the generic anticipates Greenberg’s shift from on your eyesight. It was a kind of visual imprint.”41 This closely echoes the championing demanding medium specificity to allowing a blank canvas to be art. Later Greenberg of “opticality” by Greenberg and Fried. would also suggest that such a generic art be “taken in at a glance,” that it be so unified Opticality is a notoriously hallucinatory concept in Greenberg’s account of mod- as “to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time.” Hence, opticality—which ernism, as evidenced in a passage in “Sculpture in Our Time” (1958). In this essay, the begins as a means to describe art’s otherness from our mundane world of things in order concept serves to modify Greenberg’s idea of medium specificity, allowing him to reject to free it from the tyranny of both mimetic depiction and material density—becomes a any evidence of the “sculptural” (that is, the illusion of three-dimensional space) within condition for spectatorship. Not content to describe an alternative, autonomous aesthetic painting yet allowing sculpture “to be as pictorial as it pleases.” Opticality, Greenberg universe, Greenberg has the optical condition colonize the viewer’s body: “You are suggested, puts summoned and gathered into one point in the continuum of duration....You become all

20 21 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

attention, which means that you become, for the moment, selfless and in a sense probably done soon afterward and could have even been painted at Princeton—though entirely identified with the object of your attention.”43 it is possible that Stella titled the work later, which, as Brenda Richardson has demon- Fried has exposed the double valence of Greenberg’s opticality as both generic— strated in her catalogue of the Black paintings, was his practice. Seward Park (plate 10), that is, a condition of all modernist art from impressionism onward—and specific to a referring to what was once a political rallying place for the immigrant community of particular body of work by postwar American “colorists”; and this latter sense is the way the Lower East Side, may have been painted at the Eldridge Street studio, since it is Fried has used the concept in his own criticism. Because opticality for Fried is not nearby. It is probable that Blue Horizon (plate 21) was begun at Eldridge Street (with an essential to art in general, he is able to incorporate it as part of a passing phase that led entirely diMerent composition) and given its allover signature color at West Broadway.48 to a new emphasis on shape and surface in Stella’s work in the 1960s. This critical Given their titles, we can reasonably assume that East Broadway (plate 17), named gesture was crucial to establishing the terms of Stella’s relationship to minimalism, to after the street where Frampton and Andre moved toward the end of the year, and West his earlier material impulses, and to his debt to Johns in his 1958 work.44 Broadway (plate 18) were painted in the West Broadway studio. Christian Geelhaar has noted that West Broadway was originally titled D Train, after a subway line that terminates at Coney Island, and it is therefore logical to connect the painting Coney Island (plate 20) Titles and Chronology with that studio as well; Geelhaar also cites Stella’s recollection that he painted Astoria It is dikcult to say with certainty which 1958 paintings Stella executed at Princeton, (plate 22), Luncheon on the Grass (plate 37), and Delta (plate 26) at West Broadway too.49 which at Eldridge Street, and which at West Broadway, though evidence exists to place Additional evidence for the sequence of the works at the West Broadway studio some at specific locations and therefore to get a sense of roughly when they were comes from the 1966 interview with Solomon, in which the artist explains that his first made. Stella recalls that the only paintings from 1958 done at Princeton were Tundra and studios were notoriously cramped, but this did not prevent him from working in a large Perfect Day for Banana Fish. Colorado, Requiem for Johnnie Stompanato, Red River Valley, format—a preference he attributes to the typically large size and scale of abstract- Great Jones Street, and Blue Horizon are all inscribed with the Eldridge Street address, expressionist work: but this provenance must be taken with caution, as it was Stella’s common practice to work on multiple canvases at a time, return to an earlier canvas to rework it, and often I tried to work at the limits of the interior space that I’m in and I’ve date and inscribe paintings retrospectively.45 always liked the things to fill the space up so I built the things as Colorado (plate 4) now lacks the roughly three-inch-deep stretcher that character- big as I could with cotton duck and the size and the scale all seemed izes nearly all Stella’s canvases from his final months at Princeton and well into the right, but the...organization was like a problem, I mean, because 1960s.46 Bannard had suggested the thick stretcher to Stella at some point in late 1957, it became very arbitrary or very fussy...[why I] placed a block at as a “simple mechanical way to cope with the problem of stretchers for large paintings”— the top, placed a block on the one side, placed a block on the other and, as Stella asserts, all the 1958 canvases had them, which suggests that Colorado side,...placed a block at the bottom, placed a [block] in one corner was restretched at a later date.47 Requiem for Johnnie Stompanato (plate 6) is named or the other corner, you had the four corners and the middle part, after the abusive lover of the Hollywood “Sweater Girl” Lana Turner, who was shot to you had a diagonal structure, this, that and the other,...they just death by Turner’s fourteen-year-old daughter to protect her mother. The painting there- didn’t seem to sit right, and so I did a couple of things which were fore can definitely be dated after April 4, 1958, the date of Stompanato’s death; it was painted over the blocks, but a couple of paintings had had just the

22 23 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

bands on them, and that seemed interesting, so they’re just a series The majority of the 1958 paintings were titled after personally significant places in of horizontal bands, but still there was a lot of underpaintings, and , summertime retreats near Stella’s hometown of Malden, Massachusetts, the underpainting came through as it does with that kind of paint or places he visited during a cross-country trip he took the summer after his sophomore [on] the unsized duck, and I didn’t like that, so then I decided to year in college. Stella’s enthusiasm for jazz is reflected in titles for two paintings from work with just the bands. 1958, both of which were included on undated lists he made with Andre bearing titles for the majority of the Black paintings: Criss Cross is named after a piece by Thelonious This inventory of the compositional decisions that Stella was increasingly less willing to Monk (first recorded in 1949), and Yugatan (plate 25) is the name Stella remembers of a make goes through every possibility for placing his “blocks.” It reads like an exegesis club in Harlem. The jazz references link the 1958 works to Black paintings from 1959–60 on what he called “relational painting”: a kind of carefully considered, balanced mode such as Club Onyx, Turkish Mambo, and Tuxedo Junction. Likewise, titles for later works of pictorial organization that, in the 1964 interview with Glaser, he akliated (rightly or such as Tomlinson Court Park, Arundel Castle, and Clinton Plaza refer to sites near Stella’s wrongly) with Concrete art and thought of as “European”—detrimental to any artist who house-painting jobs during his first fall in New York, as does the 1958 painting Astoria.53 strongly identified with the American abstract expressionists.50 A detail from Andre’s biography is later reflected in the title of the Black painting In this passage we can also read clear references to a group of later paintings Seven Steps (1959), named after a lesbian bar “to which men were not admitted without from this year: Astoria, Blue Horizon (plate 21), and Criss Cross (plate 23) are three works a female escort” that Stella claims retained a special fascination for his friend. Richard- in which horizontal bands obfuscate earlier compositions, and they are followed by son, in her discussion of the titles of the Black paintings, groups the more personally Luncheon on the Grass, a work Stella elsewhere explicitly describes in such a way that it significant titles referring to jazz joints and gay and lesbian nightclubs with the “down- could be regarded as being “just the bands.” Finally, we know that Stella began work beat” titles that allude to Nazism, disasters, and death. This conflation is problematic, on the Black paintings at West Broadway, allowing us to place Morro Castle (plate 27), yet given Stella’s early willingness to let friends like Andre and Frampton speak on his Reichstag (plate 28), and Arbeit Macht Frei (plate 29) there. He also recalls that he made behalf, one wonders whether he did not consider artistic autobiography itself a kind of Them Apples and his other cardboard and wood constructions at this studio, simulta- “disaster” that could inspire its own version of yellow journalism, namely, the kind of neously with the first Black paintings.51 Save for these (rather imprecise) ideas of where criticism celebrating the Romantic cult of the genius-artist he abhorred in the pages of and perhaps when certain paintings were executed, we do not know the sequence in Art News and Arts. Indeed, in the “Art 60” symposium held at New York University on which Stella painted his 1958 works. April 21, 1960, vividly recalls Stella’s antiauthorial statements as evidence Brenda Richardson’s catalogue of the Black paintings identifies recurring themes— that Stella was seeking an alternative to the uniquely inspired gesture: “He claimed that death and suicide, Nazism, insane asylums, major disasters, urban blight, and housing his own painting aimed for unoriginality—originality gone dead. What interested him projects—in what she calls Stella’s “depressing” titles for the series. Several of these most was a good idea rather than the process of painting; he could not see why it was already appear in the titles of the 1958 work. The tabloid fodder that inspired Stella to bad for an artist who had a good idea just to paint it....He said he would welcome name a work after such an unsavory character as Stompanato lends the magisterial mechanical means to paint his pictures, that is to translate ideas into painting....He also term requiem an ironic twist. Perfect Day for Banana Fish was lifted from a J. D. Salinger said that his idea of a picture was one that was the same all over and the same in the short story in which his recurring character Seymour Glass commits suicide while on next painting, one in which only paint was used and none of himself. Stella concluded his honeymoon.52 by saying that he did not know why he was an artist, or even if he was one.”54

24 25 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

When we consider the autobiographical function of Stella’s titles, so prevalent in Emily Genauer, reviewing the exhibition for the New York Herald Tribune, called Stella’s the 1958 works, together with Andre’s coauthorship of the lists of titles for the Black paintings “unspeakably boring” and described them as “huge black canvases lined with paintings, we cannot say whose life is signified in any given title, and the deeply anti- white pin-stripes.” Stella chose to respond to Genauer with a letter to the editor autobiographical gesture that unites the Black paintings and the 1958 works is thrown ghostwritten by Frampton, “An Artist Writes to Correct and Explain.” Printed among the into relief. reviews in the arts section rather than with other letters, the missive reads like a man- ifesto: “I did not invent the term ‘stripe paintings,’ but rather the paintings them- selves....I concede it is sukciently accurate. My paintings are what I do, not what I omit.

One of Sixteen Americans In fact, I paint black stripes about 2 1/2 inches wide. Therefore the unpainted white And so each stripe gradually became more autonomous. That was “one thing at a spaces between them are not the stripes, but what you call the ‘background.’” Frampton time” instead of “one area of the painting next to each other.” presents Stella’s aesthetic as anything but reductive (“my paintings are what I do, not —Frank Stella to Alan Solomon, 1966 what I omit”). In addition, he denies a mutually defining relationship between painted figure and physical ground—there are black stripes and nothing more, and even The order is not rationalistic or underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, to acknowledge the white of the bare canvas as “background” is suspect.55 one thing after another. A painting isn’t an image. Whereas Stella’s earlier selection for the Three Young Americans exhibition at —Donald Judd on Stella’s shaped canvases, in “Specific Objects” (1965) Oberlin College (May 11–30, 1959) had included the now-lost Luncheon on the Grass from 1958, for his more conspicuous debut at moma Stella was represented exclu- Stella’s first big break came with the group exhibition Sixteen Americans at The Museum sively by a group of Black paintings: Arundel Castle, The Marriage of Reason and of Modern Art in New York (moma), curated by Dorothy Miller and on view December 16, Squalor, Tomlinson Court Park, and “Die Fahne Hoch!” were all painted in 1959, yet 1959, through February 14, 1960. This exhibition followed the format of a series of their titles, as we shall see, came out of Stella’s interests and practice of 1958. shows moma had staged since its founding in which a curator selected a group of con- New York audiences had seen examples of such work—Club Onyx and Clinton Plaza temporary artists and gave each of them a separate gallery. Unlike the recent Fifteen (both 1959) were in group shows at, respectively, Tibor de Nagy (April 7–25) and Leo Americans (1952) and Twelve Americans (1956), which showcased the work of older, more Castelli (October 6–17)—yet, as Rubin remarked, comparing the moma installation established artists like Franz Kline, , , and ClyMord Still, with what he had experienced at Castelli: “Seeing a roomful of them at the Museum, about half of the artists in Sixteen Americans were “newcomers” whose work could not I was almost mesmerized by their eerie, magical presence” (figs. 18, 19). (Rubin easily be assimilated into a particular style or movement. They were “presented simply later ascribed this “eerie” quality to their facture, the diMerent way the black paint as individuals and Americans.” Stella’s work was singled out from that of the other absorbed and refracted light.) Miller had seen Club Onyx at Tibor de Nagy and with unknown artists in the exhibition by William Rubin, writing for Art International, as Castelli had visited the West Broadway studio in the summer. All the works on loan seeming “to measure up to the majority [in the exhibition] who have shown more or to moma were courtesy of Castelli, who, after the studio visit, had added Stella to his less widely,” namely, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Alfred Leslie, , impressive roster of artists (which included Johns and Rauschenberg) and consented Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Stankiewicz, and Jack Youngerman. This was high praise, to postpone the artist’s first one-man show so that a large selection of the Black particularly as Stella’s work, indeed his very inclusion, was decried by most other critics. paintings could be included in Sixteen Americans.56

26 27 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

fig 18. Installation view of the exhibition In the catalogues for both the Oberlin and the moma exhibitions, Stella sub- Sixteen Americans, The Museum of Modern Art, mitted an artist statement penned by Andre on his behalf, the succinct “Preface to New York, 1959–60. Stripe Painting” (which was reprinted a third time as part of Frampton’s letter to the Tribune editor): “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.”57 Stella was not the only artist to enlist a fellow artist to write his statement for Sixteen Americans— Grace Hartigan was a less astute scribe for Alfred Leslie, an artist Rubin considered one of the better “second-generation Abstract Expressionists.” “Second generation” was the vague appellation given to those whose “Tenth Street touch,” long champi- oned by Art News under editor Thomas B. Hess, was increasingly perceived as render- ing the authentic achievement of de Kooning badly “decorative.” However, Leslie’s work, more than that of de Kooning or Pollock, particularly impressed Stella during his years at Princeton; the second generation initially had more influence on the fig 19. Installation view of Frank Stella, Clinton Plaza, and Robert Rauschenberg, Inlet (both young artist because “they were the ones that were most active, were getting the 1959), at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, 1959. most kind of publicity in general.”58 Thierry de Duve describes Andre’s “Preface” as “utterly Greenbergian”: its over- statement of painting’s necessity reflects Greenberg’s avowal in “Modernist Painting” that each artistic medium “had to determine, through its own operations and works, the eMects exclusive to itself.” While Greenberg’s enormously influential collection of essays Art and Culture was not published until 1961, Andre would probably have been familiar with his theory of the essentialism of artistic media, especially as Greenberg was Stella’s favorite critic. On the other hand, Andre’s call to avoid the disembodied exchange of symbolic “counters passed among people” (right away one thinks of allusions to money and language) in favor of the obdurate materialism of paint has led James Meyer to label the “Preface to Stripe Painting” the “clarion call of literalism”—that is, of minimal- ism, Greenberg’s bête noire.59 This overlap between Greenberg’s theoretical position (at least as it stood in the early 1960s) and a nascent “literal” discourse—an overlap rooted in the material thing, the stuM of painting—should by now be no surprise. What remains

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to be seen is how this overlap has its first manifestation not in the Black paintings, as Reichstag was the first “all black” painting: it does not exhibit any underpainting in a Duve argues, but in Stella’s 1958 works. diMerent color.60 This is a reversal of Stella’s initial idea that these paintings emerged from his polychromatic work earlier in that year, marking the end of his 1958 practice, not the beginning of his penchant for working in series. Typologies This former idea is made explicit in a sketch Stella made for a lecture he gave at Taken together, the Black paintings constitute Stella’s first series per se. Yet it was a series the Pratt Institute in January or February 1960, while his paintings were still on view at unlike all the others in that Stella did not consciously begin it by making programmatic moma (fig. 20). This sketch and the text of the Pratt lecture were rescued from the rubbish sketches. The Black paintings became a series, evolved into a discrete body of work, bin by Andre and included in his autobiographical artist book Passport (1960). Several fig 20. Frank Stella, Sketch for Pratt Lecture, from Carl Andre, Passport, artist’s book, 1960, p. 82. Pencil on once he was well into them. It is no surprise, then, that there are several “first” Black schemata for the 1958 paintings are recognizable in this sketch, which shows them lined wove paper mounted on wove paper, 3 3/4 x81/2 in. paintings whose “firstness” can only be ascribed retrospectively. According to Richardson, up in a kind of narrative progression, roughly divided into four groups, in a manner that (9.37 x 21.75 cm). Gift of the artist (PA 1953), Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Stella named Delta “the first black painting” and said that making Morro Castle was vaguely mimics a single-row museum installation of paintings on a wall. The drawing Mass., 1983.35.82. the first time he “consciously set out to make a black painting.” She also notes that thus has a marked aknity with another sketch, Exibition [sic] of Twelve Paintings by Frank Stella (1958–59; fig. 21), executed on the back of stationery from the Little Gallery in Princeton. This unsolicited exhibition installation was wishful thinking; it was never brought to fruition, as Stella recounted to Christian Geelhaar for a catalogue of his “working drawings,” one of the few books to dwell at any length on the 1958 works. Geelhaar commented that the drawing “is only partly a resumé of the pictures that had at that time been painted; in some of the sketches, later compositions already announce themselves.”61 The Pratt sketch, on the other hand, is all resumé; it functions

as Stella’s first retrospective. fig 21. Frank Stella, Exibition of Twelve Paintings The Pratt sketch will serve as our guide through Stella’s 1958 oeuvre, allowing us to by Frank Stella, 1958–59. Pencil on paper, 9 x 6 1/4 in. (22.8 x 15.8 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel, recognize how Stella worked out problems in color and structure in small constellations Kupferstichkabinett. of works. It is important to remember that he provided this first account of his own development after he had already created the serial logic of the Black paintings in 1959. The sketch’s systematic, linear cataloguing of what was a far more improvisational practice established the terms by which these early paintings have been received ever since. While these paintings were crucial to the development of the Black paintings, their status as independent works has been subsumed by the teleological insistence of Stella’s sketch. It is not my intention to cordon oM the Black paintings from consider- ation in order to grant the 1958 works the attention they deserve. But the 1958 paintings show Stella working out a number of concerns that would not be recognizable if we

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fig 22. Frank Stella, “Die Fahne Hoch!” 1959. Enamel simply saw them as immature attempts leading to the start of his serial practice. I shall on canvas, 10 ft. 1 1/2 in. x 6 ft. 1 in. (308.6 x 185.4 cm). follow the Pratt sketch in roughly reverse order, both to resist the teleological impulse Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase, with and to render the boundary between an ending and a beginning more permeable, less funds from the John I. H. Baur Purchase Fund; the historically overdetermined. Charles and Anita Blatt Fund; Peter M. Brant; B. H. Friedman; the Gilman Foundation, Inc.; Susan Morse Hilles; The Lauder Foundation; Frances and The “Nazi” Paintings ; the Albert A. List Fund; Philip Morris Reichstag (plate 28) was the first of a trio of paintings—along with Arbeit Macht Frei Incorporated; Sandra Payson; Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield; Mrs. Percy Uris; Warner Communications, (plate 29) and “Die Fahne Hoch!” (1959; fig. 22)—that Stella titled with overt reference Inc.; and the National Endowment for the Arts. to Germany’s Third Reich. At the far right of the Pratt sketch are two images: the top represents Reichstag and the lower is a square-shaped amalgam of Arbeit Macht Frei and “Die Fahne Hoch!” bearing the notation “the final solution.” In 1945 Barnett Newman reflected that the horrors of the recent world war raised the problem of subject matter, of “what to paint,” yet Stella’s baldly direct references to Nazism could not fail to shock late 1950s audiences who preferred to focus on Germany’s rehabilitation as an American ally against communism.62 Characteristically for Stella, these deadpan, hermetic paintings are in no way illustrative of their titles. Reichstag, Arbeit Macht Frei, and “Die Fahne Hoch!” maintain a group identity through their structure: Arbeit Mach Frei and “Die Fahne Hoch!” are structurally the same painting (though their dimensions are slightly diMerent). They are biaxially symmetrical around the central point of intersection that divides the surface into quadrants, but Arbeit Macht Frei is oriented horizontally and “Die Fahne Hoch!” vertically. Very little of the bare canvas that yielded what Genauer called the pin-stripes of the painting can be seen in Arbeit Macht Frei. The paint bleeds into these interstices and leaves only inciden- tal hints of the canvas peeking through. The overall eMect is of a black-on-black painting with dark velvety lines between the thick, more reflective stripes. The paint looks slightly brown, characteristic of Stella’s earliest Black paintings, a quality Richardson attributes to his mixing white enamel into the cheap black enamel he used, “producing what he then called a ‘no-color.’” (He would later abandon this practice to paint directly from the can of black enamel.)63 “Die Fahne Hoch!,” however, displays the increasing regular- ity of stroke and increase in the gap between the painted bands that would characterize the later Black paintings, executed after Stella had decided he was painting a series.

32 33 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

Richardson, adding to the anxiety over “firstness” that appears to plague a series destined to read as figure against a ground, with the figure delimited by the outermost rich with second versions, states that Arbeit Macht Frei is “the first of the Black paintings thin lines generated by the exposed ground of the canvas and the ground provided by to assume the basic character of all the later works in the series.”64 Yet she is also the painted leftover areas in the corners.66 quick to note that the cruciform pattern in both Arbeit Macht Frei and “Die Fahne Hoch!” The vertical, rectangular margins of Morro Castle yield the same eMect, framing is described as “the final solution” in Stella’s Pratt sketch. This overt allusion to the what we can almost imagine are “two symmetrical parts of an inverted mirror image”— Holocaust and the Third Reich sounds a note of finality. It suggests that Stella considered a doubled pattern of nested frames that open out onto the edge of the canvas. Franz the Black paintings—their patterned configurations and the technique employed to Fedier has shown that this symmetry is specious: if we were to try to follow the central make them—both a culmination and a near obliteration of what came before, rather horizontal line, we would discover that one of the stripes, amid the many bearing a than, as has often been suggested, a radical break coming from nowhere. boxy U-shape, is a zigzag that runs from the upper left down to the lower right of the canvas (à la Stella’s later Copper painting Ophir, fig. 23). Fedier goes on to make the The “First” Black Paintings liminal nature of this particular canvas within Stella’s oeuvre explicit, elucidating its The penultimate group in the Pratt sketch, signified by the sketch of Reichstag, is cap- importance as a Black painting and as a work from 1958: “Morro Castle seems to me to tioned “turning the corner” and “the left over areas.” And as with “the final solu- be a key painting in Stella’s work, because it contains everything that becomes important tion,” with its intense play between allusive and literal meanings, “turning the corner” implies a move toward an impending climax as much as it illustrates Stella’s first fig 23. Frank Stella, Ophir, 1960–61. Copper oil paint on canvas. 8 ft. 2 1/2 in. x 6 ft. 10 3/4 in. incorporation of the right angle in his work. (250.2 x 210.2 cm). Location unknown. The three paintings that lay equal claim to being the “first” Black painting— Reichstag, Delta (plate 26), and Morro Castle (plate 27)—constitute a group because each oMers a treatment of the “left over” area, a problem that Stella believed plagued abstract expressionism, particularly in the work of its epigones, who often got “into trouble in the corners.”65 Delta’s entire structure is aMected by the “left over” area that Stella refuses to trace with the repetitive stripe pattern. Jutting in from the right side of the painting is a triangular form that emphasizes the asymmetrical placement of Delta’s chevron pattern. Likewise, in Reichstag, Stella did not continue his striped pattern but rather filled in relatively large blocks in the top corners. No matter how far he might extend this nesting pattern of concentric right angles, the actual limit of the rectangular support would always ensure that small rectangles remain deposited in the corners. The large “left over” areas in Reichstag can be considered an exaggerated acknowledg- ment of this inevitability—whereas a diMerent response to this condition was removing them from the shaped canvases of the Aluminum series, another innovation suggested by Bannard. In Reichstag, however, the pattern, despite the monochrome scheme, is

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in the following paintings of the black series. It also combines what was separated in depth); and Luncheon on the Grass (today known only two pictures from the transitional period, Coney Island and Grape Island (both from 1958): through black-and-white reproduction) presents a the striped ground and the thing in the middle. The thing in the middle is a dark triangle that appears to be generated by stacking stripes rectangle—the actual and unmediated message that the paintings contain.”67 The union creeping up, rather than into, the canvas. Both Robert of the zigzag with the striped pattern in Morro Castle is so complete that we have to Rosenblum and Michael Fried remember Luncheon on make a conscious eMort just to apprehend it—and yet this zigzag stripe is for Fedier the the Grass—one of the “last color paintings” according to essential element, the “thing in the middle,” rather than, as we might expect, the the Pratt sketch—as being blue and green. It was com- entire labyrinthine pattern, itself wedged between two broad margins. parable in palette to two diminutive ink-on-cardboard Stella chose to repeat the pattern of Morro Castle the following year in Arundel pieces: one glued, without comment, in the pages of Castle (fig. 24), with two major modifications: not only have the left over margins been Andre’s Passport (fig. 25), and the other, Portrait of removed, but the thing in the middle, the figure against a ground, has disappeared, Michael Fried Standing on His Head Far Above Cayuga’s leaving a corrected, mirror-image composition in which figure and ground are now fully Waters (1959), reproduced as the frontispiece to Fried’s integrated. Even the stripes that fill in the leftover areas at the centers of the two compilation Art and Objecthood.68 U-shapes do not generate residual figure-ground relationships as do the corners in Whereas the monochromatic works Astoria and Reichstag. Here Stella successfully exploits the a priori aknity that the rectilinear edges Blue Horizon are typically considered prophetic of of these innermost stripes have with the U-shaped pattern itself. But more than the the all-black works, it is Luncheon on the Grass that in illusion of spatial depth on a flat pictorial surface is suppressed in Arundel Castle. Fedier’s the Pratt sketch immediately precedes the Reichstag invocation of the earlier works Coney Island and Grape Island (plates 20, 19) suggests configuration and “the final solution.”69 Under the dia- that the thing in the middle has also disappeared, leading us to assume that Stella also gram of Luncheon, Stella wrote: “image/no more/ expunged the diMerence between two fundamentally diMerent elements—material repainting/reworking/start to finish/one operation/in thing and optical pattern. 4 parts/or coats.” This suggests that Luncheon is the first painting Stella made by planning rather than fig 24. Frank Stella, Arundel Castle, 1959. Enamel on The Delta Group reworking, by a priori ideation rather than composition canvas, 10 ft. 1 3/8 in. x 6 ft. 1 1/8 in. (308.1 x 186.1 cm). Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, The repeating chevrons of Delta hark back to an earlier work, Luncheon on the Grass (plate directly on the surface of the canvas, a process that Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. Gift of 37). Along with Yugatan (plate 25), Delta and Luncheon on the Grass suggest another yielded the heavily encrusted surfaces of both Astoria Joseph H. Hirshhorn, 1972. cluster of paintings that together work out a single concern, namely a centralized triangu- and Blue Horizon (and, indeed, nearly all the 1958 lar form. Jones considers this form an allusion to recessional, perspectival painting. If paintings). This process, rather than monochromaticity fig 25. Frank Stella, Untitled, from Carl Andre, so, these three works certainly flaunt their undermining of such representational depth: or even repetitive, modular design, became the hall- Passport, artist’s book, 1960, p. 34. Marker and crayon Yugatan is so loaded with paint that its triangular form is nearly invisible; Delta’s alter- mark of Stella’s future work, as demonstrated in the on heavy wove paper mounted on wove paper, 5 11/16 x35/16 in. (14.5 x 8.4 cm). Gift of the artist nating shiny and matte stripes keep the form on the surface of the painting (similarly, the Frampton photographs showing Stella working on a (PA 1953), Addison Gallery of American Art, rivulets of paint dripping down the funnel reinforce the emphasis on surface rather than Black painting by filling in already penciled lines (fig. 26). Phillips Academy, Andover, Mass., 1983.35.34.

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Gone would be the back and forth of Pollock’s method of painting from the floor to labeled “wanderings,” which comes before these “last color paintings,” we find reference the wall and back to the floor to ponder and rework; gone would be Newman’s con- to Coney Island (plate 20), composed of the three primary colors, two of which seem to be sidered placement of his “zips” on colored fields at the moment of painting. Instead, extracted, so to speak, into Astoria and Blue Horizon. And in Criss Cross (plate 23), hints of in an eMort to suppress the (at best) intuitive or (at worst) arbitrary composition of the yellow, red, and blue come through what is perhaps Stella’s most thoroughly masked work, Stella’s painting process would be limited to “one operation,” which would painting. Although Coney Island and Criss Cross both employ all three primary colors, in require the utmost concentration on the accuracy of his hand rather than on ongoing the former they retain their identities before mixing, and in the latter they seem to merge aesthetic judgment. into a black that is an “all-color” (as opposed to the “no-color” that Stella sought for his Stella never considered Reichstag the first Black painting, but it is certainly the later Black paintings). first all-black painting. The gaps between the black stripes in Delta and Morro Castle In Coney Island, Stella experimented with the stripes’ lateral expansion within and reveal partially obscured layers of colored paint. These gaps yield little information as against a near-square support; Astoria and Blue Horizon are both exact squares. The to what those now-hidden layers might have looked like. Calvin Tomkins reports that blue block overlaying the center of Coney Island’s canvas, displaced above the central Delta was initially intended to be a red-and-black painting, but Stella found the task point of symmetry, echoes in shape the edges of the actual support. The stripes that frustrating—hence the near obliteration of the red by ever-widening bands of black.70 border this block on either side refuse to correspond across it, interrupting the illusion This account fails to acknowledge that there is a great deal of green paint in Delta or of a smooth continuity beneath the blue form. The block anchors the work, and the that Stella had already made a “red and black” painting, Great Jones Street (plate 8). striped pattern, while at first appearing to be deduced from the limits of the support Toward the end of 1958 Stella was apparently preoccupied with limiting his palette alone, accumulates in sections around this interior disturbance—a disturbance that is to black and one other color. This ambition yielded a small trio of works: Delta, Great veiled by a single color in Astoria and even more fully obliterated in Blue Horizon. In fig 26. Hollis Frampton, Untitled, from The Secret Jones Street, and Green Grate (plate 7), a green-and-black painting (as the unusually Coney Island the interior, “depicted shape” of the blue block holds the privileged posi- World of Frank Stella, 1958–62. Black-and-white descriptive title indicates). If Great Jones Street and Green Grate toy with monochro- tion Fried later accorded to “literal shape” (the physical shape of the support) in the photograph, 10 x 8 in. (25.4 x 20.3 cm). Collection Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Gift of Marion maticity—the black acting less as another color than as the mark of a censor deleting an Irregular Polygons of 1966–67: “Unless, in a given painting, depicted shape manages to Faller, 1993. unacceptable text—then Delta collapses their respective color schemes together onto participate in, by helping to establish, the authority of the shape of the support, con- its surface, and in addition to the canceling eMect of the black that threatens to over- viction is aborted and the painting fails.”71 The slightly oM-center blockage in Coney whelm all evidence of any other color, there is suggested the conceptual cancellation of Island generates an enormous amount of tension within the composition, for it rests the two complementary colors, green and red, a hue and its afterimage. heavily on a red stripe but invades the yellow stripe above, barely avoiding a connection with the red stripe beyond. (It is clear that the artist changed his mind, painting over The Coney Island Group part of the blue with yellow to create this gap.) The blue block, by appearing to jar the Included in the Pratt sketch with Luncheon on the Grass under the category “last color continuity of the stripes, interrupting their even flow like a scar, is the pivot of the paintings” are monochromatic works, signified by a diagram of uninflected horizontal composition and, indeed, of our perception of the literal boundaries of the painting’s bands filling the frame and labeled “one color,” resembling Blue Horizon (plate 21) and edge. Our experience of the painting’s materiality—in this instance, the edges of its Astoria (plate 22). As if in answer to the Delta subgroup’s color, Astoria and Blue Horizon support—is therefore governed by the image of the blue block, beginning there and engage the primary colors yellow and blue. In the group of paintings in the Pratt sketch working outward, piece by piece, stripe by stripe.

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The structure of Coney Island—block against striped field—suggests another sub- in assemblage, in his canvases, at least, we see a progressive sacrifice of material dis- group, which includes East Broadway (plate 17), West Broadway (plate 18), and Grape junction in favor of an increasingly unified image. A concomitant shift is the gradual Island (plate 19). In Grape Island, named after one of the islands in Harbor, the ascendancy of literal over depicted shape, the increasing integration of the composition tension provided by the gap between the stripes and a central block is absent; taking this with its support from the edges inward rather than from a central block outward. together with the better alignment of the stripes on either side of the block, we can more easily see how the depicted shape is here anchored by the literal shape. The piecemeal Grids composition around the central block akrms the material unity of the painting, rather Stella explored the integral relationship between surface and support in another pair of than works against it, as it did in Coney Island, where we could imagine Stella handling paintings done earlier in the year, most likely at Eldridge Street. In Colorado (plate 4) discrete compositional elements as though they were so many pieces of patchwork. and Requiem for Johnnie Stompanato (plate 6) he experimented with the historical Whereas the paint handling in Coney Island, with its thin strokes of dry paint, yields little eMectiveness of the grid as a sign of both the material surface of the canvas and an incip- impasto or material disturbance on the surface, in Grape Island the paint is thickly ient pictorial image. A work like Arbeit Macht Frei (or, indeed, the majority of the Black applied and the surface is heavily textured. We can easily see that the yellow bands are paintings)—whose central, perpendicularly intersecting lines quarter the canvas and laid over a field of brick red and the central block is a section of this field that has been appear to generate the rippling cruciform pattern—is an important precedent for a flurry spared the yellow paint but then incompletely covered with green, giving the impression of works in the 1960s that obsess over the grid as a device to banish, alleviate, or con- of an object whose surface has been worn away. Whereas Coney Island’s composition trol the peculiarities of artistic subjectivity. The grid made its appearance very early in gives it the look of material disjunction, of an alien block lying over or against a striped Stella’s work, though not in a manner that asserted a look of empirical “objectivity.” field, its actual materiality (that is, its relative uniformity of facture) works against this Rather, Stella’s employment of the grid in these early canvases exposes it as an inherently impression. In Grape Island, conversely, the composition appears more regular, more faulty mechanism for signifying what remains the fundamentally obscure materialism unified, and yet the handling of the paint flaunts its materiality and suggests a state of of surface and support—a materialism that, as we have seen with Grape Island and degradation. These two works achieve what I shall call a collage eMect, manifested in the Coney Island, might not cohere with the image. complementary ways they assert and deny material discontinuity within the image. For the sake of brevity, I shall limit my analysis to Colorado, whose gentle This collage eMect is more negated than akrmed by the vaguely complementary organization on a nine-block grid is more subtle than that of Requiem and perhaps at colors of West Broadway, a work whose block is now a broad, symmetrically placed field first more dikcult to see. The grid divisions are here most evident in the lower register: of color oMset by an even larger area overrun by stripes. Although we can see that at the far right, a pink area was imperfectly painted over patches of indigo and aqua- the stripes bordering the green field do not line up, this is only clear at the top of the marine; at the far left, a yellow layer was applied as a general covering; in the central canvas, at the point farthest from our view. Were we to focus on the field itself, its zone, yellow has been applied in four distinct vertical stripes. In the middle register of impressive width would prevent us from readily seeing any misalignment, and the overall Colorado, which is dominated by striking red horizontal bands, the continuation of eMect is one of increased continuity. the grid is less conspicuous. The brushwork maintains this structure, however, though its Over the course of the year, Stella would reconsider his rapport with Johns’s work, loose, almost careless appearance also works against it. Two of the red stripes are which informed how he handled paint to suggest a collage eMect. Although he ended reinforced by narrower streaks of yellow. The uppermost of these appears to have begun the year with his cardboard-and-wood constructions, thus continuing his early interest with a brush dripping paint at the far left edge of the right third of the painting, at

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an imaginary border that extends up from the right edge of the vertical pattern below. 1. color + This deliberate beginning with a fully loaded brush occurs at a crucial point that rein- depth forces the division of the painting into thirds along vertical axes. Likewise, the central symetry to area of this nine-block grid is defined on its left, where all four red stripes go from a symetry barely present to forcefully reiterated. Indeed, to the left of the lowest red stripe is a 2. psycho-color segment of indigo-pink-yellow, continuing the lateral extension of the stripe but the city-yellow rudely erasing the red so as to align roughly along the vertical axis staked out below, + about where the yellow field and the yellow verticals meet. black Thus Stella divided his canvas using two distinct techniques to create his grid: -enamel the horizontal registers are designated by color and pattern, the vertical by facture. This its quality latter method is most evident in the top register, where the color and pattern of the indigo and pink-over-blue stripes appear at first to extend seamlessly, transgressing the With its “door” motif—also articulated in Them Apples and its untitled mate—Red River vertical axes. Whereas the color and pattern of this top area is uniform from side to Valley belongs to another subgroup that includes East Broadway and Green Grate. East side, its material surface is not. The disruptions under the surface rendered visible by Broadway has the yellow-and-black color scheme that Stella calls “psycho-color.”72 Yet facture allow us to see the extension of the verticals to the top of the canvas. it is most remarkable for the ways in which he consciously experimented with the Indeed, rather than function as a readymade, ideated form grafted onto a mate- diMerent eMects of black enamel. The painting appears to have been a black field that rial body (the stretched canvas), the grid in Colorado and Requiem depends on the yellow stripes were painted over. The yellow thus takes on a somewhat greenish cast— tactile diMerences of paints handled in a number of ways—the grid is implied, rather especially apparent in the door motif. Stella then went back over these stripes with than declared, through a process akin to collage, a material juxtaposition of brushwork yellow, generating highlights that appear to sit atop the stripes. The eMect of the yellow and color, rather than a purposeful inscription of line. In Requiem, this collage eMect and black interaction is by no means uniform, and, indeed, in the striped area to the plays oM of thick, dark outlines that both incompletely define the grid and reduplicate right of the “door,” Stella worked with distinctly alternating stripes, instead of bands within some of its compartments. As in Coney Island, in which the stripe pattern adjusts lying on a fairly uniform field. The striped area above the door and to its left exhibits the itself bit by bit around a field of blue, or Them Apples, with its patterns intersecting sheen and drip of black enamel that has been painted in several layers (recall Delta’s the material folds of its cardboard support, the blocks of the grid in Colorado and shiny stripes), whereas in the far right area of the canvas, the paint appears to have Requiem generate an image through disturbances in the paint and painting process. soaked into the fabric. Again, as in Coney Island, the stripes as image initially appear continuous; at first Collage Effect in the “Door” Paintings glance, the composition seems to be unified “behind” the door. Yet the varied behavior Stella continued to play with the traditional materials of paint and canvas to mimic or of the enamel paint gives the surface the patchwork texture of collage, visible only suggest the eMects of collage. In the Pratt sketch, the Coney Island-like diagram is after more prolonged study. The door figure, which appears to jut insolently into the reg- followed by an image resembling Red River Valley (plate 16), positioned as the last of the ularly repeating bands, calls attention to this appliqué eMect (particularly with its “wanderings” before the “last color paintings.” Under these two diagrams, he notes: heavy black outline). We see a door, perhaps even orient ourselves to it, but soon realize

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that the stripes do not line up and the vertical outlines of the door extend to the top of the canvas, veiled and ghostly behind overlaid bands of color. The surface of the canvas is an intricate warp and woof; what is oMered to our vision in one part of the canvas is hidden in another. This collage eMect oMers another kind of tactile illusionism, the opposite of trompe l’oeil (what Greenberg called “sculptural” illusionism). Paint and canvas are not manipulated to deny their actual materiality in order to make an image more “real.” Rather, Stella enlists facture to establish the image. The power of the collage eMect lies in its ability not only to constitute an image but also to disrupt it, to work against its promise of continuity and coherent unity.

Vandalizing Motherwell: Against Autobiography Included with the Coney Island- and Red River Valley-type drawings in the “wander- ings” group in the Pratt sketch is a diagram for an additional subgroup. This image is captioned with the notations “1. variations/writing/Motherwell” and “2. Diebenkorn/ stripe.” (It is striking that in retrospect, on the occasion of the Pratt sketch, Stella should accord to the Bay Area artist the provenance for his stripe fig 28. Frank Stella, detail of a sheet of drawings, work and not to Johns, who is still considered the clear source.)73 In several canvases 1958. Pencil on paper, 11 x 14 in. (27.9 x 35.6 cm). from this year, Stella took on certain abstract expressionists directly, alluding, for Darby Bannard, Miami. example, to Mark Rothko’s atmospheric color fields in Tundra, Perfect Day for Banana Fish, and Plum Island (Luncheon on the Grass). His rather insolent response to the members of the “triumphant” New York School is best expressed in his parodies of Robert Motherwell’s Je t’aime paintings from 1955–56, such as Mary Lou Loves fig 27. Frank Stella, page from a sketchbook, 1958. Frank (plate 11) and Your Lips Are Blue (plate 12); the drawings Mary Lou’s Cunt Is Blue, Pencil and blue ballpoint pen on paper,

8 7/8 x51/2 in. (22.9 x 13.8 cm). Kunstmuseum Basel, Dwight D. Eisenhower Has Trichomona, Fuck You (fig. 27), and Fuck You Bannard Kupferstichkabinett. (fig. 28); and the lost canvas Mary Lou Douches with Pine-Scented Lysol (plate 35). Although Stella’s favored compositional strategy of alternating stripes of color around a rectangular blockage has a blatantly morphological, if not conceptual, analogue in Motherwell’s The Little Spanish Prison from 1941–44 (fig. 29), William Rubin notes that Stella did not see this work until 1965. Your Lips Are Blue oMers a chilly antidote to Motherwell’s sentimentality, prompting Rubin to remark, “Although Stella had a high opinion of Motherwell’s ‘Je t’aime’ paintings, he was put oM by what he considered

fig 29. Robert Motherwell, The Little Spanish Prison,

1941–44. Oil on canvas, 27 1/4 x171/8 in. (69.2 x 43.5 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Renate Ponsold Motherwell.

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the romantic pretentiousness of the French inscriptions painted across the surfaces of Grakti came into play in two crucial pedagogic encounters Stella had with the paintings” (fig. 30).74 Stephen Greene, his art teacher at Princeton. While Greene was convinced of his young More important, however, Stella adopted Motherwell’s painterly script, not so student’s “genius,” teacher and student had an intense and at times antagonistic much as a gesture of mockery in some oedipal rebellion but rather to vandalize his own relationship. In one instance, Greene, noting the overt similarity of sections of the paintings. He desecrates paintings that would otherwise have been very similar to the unfinished Perfect Day for Banana Fish with Johns’s Flag, scrawled “God Bless America” other 1958 works we have considered. Without the lettering, Mary Lou Loves Frank has in blue paint across the top of the canvas.75 Tensions erupted between teacher and an obvious compositional aknity with Seward Park and Zara (plate 9), not to mention student again when Stella, who had been painting regularly since his sophomore year at a coloristic similarity to Delta, with its combination of red, green, and black; Your Lips Andover and was determined to work in an abstract mode, refused to participate in Are Blue, with its stripe pattern amid fields of atmospheric colors, recalls Colorado, Greene’s figure drawing lessons. When Greene brought in a model to pose for life draw- Perfect Day for Banana Fish, and even Tundra and Plum Island; and the massive Mary ings, Stella scrawled, “I Can’t Draw,” in large letters across his canvas. As Stella remarked, Lou Douches, with its thick door figure against an empty field, especially relates to Red regarding his student behavior, “I was cast in the role of rebellious student by chance. River Valley. In other words, if I had been studying, say, with somebody like Bob Motherwell, then there wouldn’t have been any problem.”76 In his “script” paintings, then, we can see fig 30. Robert Motherwell, Je t’aime IV, 1955–57. Oil Stella using Motherwell’s technique not so much in parody but as a powerful means to on canvas, 5 ft. 10 1/8 in. x 9 ft. 2 in. (178.12 x 254 cm). Dedalus Foundation, Inc., New York. negate the methodical study of technique and master painters, as well as his own painterly practice. For who is addressed when Motherwell writes “Je t’aime,” and who is responsible for the utterance? Can we assume it is Motherwell’s voice, directed at us, at the painting he has just made, or at himself as he apprehends the finished painting? We could certainly ask the same questions of Your Lips Are Blue, with its final word painted in the eponymous color (whose lips are blue?), or Mary Lou Loves Frank (who wrote that bathroom-stall message? Mary Lou, Frank, or someone else?). With these works, we see explicitly how Stella’s resistance to the singularity of the work of art, and his early tendency to work across small clusters of paintings, make a mockery of pretensions to artistic originality or authorial mastery.

Objecting to Things The dikculty of identifying an “original” Black painting allows us to recognize that Stella developed that first series almost seamlessly out of an earlier practice that, while not serial as such, was structured around small subgroups of paintings, pairs or trios of works. We do not need the Black paintings to tell us that Them Apples and its untitled

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pendant constitute a painting pair; we do, however, need to call attention to the Black strongly suggest a painterly abstract composition. In paintings’ trouble with “firstness,” to recognize that the motivation behind painting Stella’s later, untitled triptych, however, the found object such a pair would have been Stella’s desire to undermine authorial presence, to refract (the wooden molding) already has a striped pattern, and an original gesture and its eMect across two, three, and sometimes four works.77 its repeated use in the central panel yields a relief pat- Stella’s early inclination to make paintings in groups not only threatens our ability to tern that reinforces the composed pattern on the left recognize (or believe in) a self-contained, singular work of art; it also assuages, through and right panels (themselves constructions of cardboard a kind of therapeutic, corrective repetition, our anxiety over a painting’s proximity to nailed to cardboard). Yet even here, the material insis- an ordinary thing, an anxiety brought to the fore by the early work of Jasper Johns. tence of the central panel and the refusal of its “stripes” Consider, for example, another assemblage that, with Them Apples, is the most of moldings to line up exactly with the painted card- overtly Johnsian of Stella’s works (plate 34). In this untitled triptych construction of board blue stripes reinforce the impression that the panel equal-sized panels, cardboard strips painted blue are nailed to cardboard panels painted has interrupted or blocked the even, lateral flow of the white and supported by wooden boards. These striped fields bracket a central assem- patterned composition. Physical materiality, here exhib- blage made of pieces of a wooden molding with dentil ornamentation painted the same ited by extra-artistic detritus, operates in a tense, unre- blue. The moldings are nailed to a piece of plywood set within an outer frame made of solved relationship to painterly image. scraps of cardboard, yielding an alternating, stripelike pattern between moldings and The wooden moldings in the untitled assemblage, resulting indentations. Whereas most of Johns’s early subjects were found signs that in oscillating between thingly materiality and compositional themselves constituted the pictorial composition—flags, targets, numbers, letters of the element, have their echo in the blue block of Coney Island alphabet—Stella’s work here takes found material and “dematerializes” it, incorporating and in the many paintings from 1958 that exhibit a it in such a way that it conforms to his invented abstract composition. similar motif, such as Zara and, perhaps most explicitly, When Johns did incorporate actual objects (or their casts) in rude juxtaposition to Seward Park (plate 10), where a pattern of alternating signs, as in Target with Four Faces (fig. 31), the objects retained their alterity and par- horizontal stripes continues across the central block in a ticularity in relation to the signs and thus to the composition as a whole. In his earliest manner that recalls the “already striped” central panel experiments with assemblage—two works he made while still a student at Princeton— of the Johnsian triptych. Though the blockage in Coney Stella granted a similar autonomy to the included objects. Though he carefully repeats Island is rendered in the same kind of house paint as the and arranges geometric forms in his Cricket/Kit Construction (plate 30), we can appreciate stripes it abuts, its ultimate function is to disrupt the fig 31. Jasper Johns, Target with Four Faces, 1955. the irreconcilable material diMerence between a paint-can lid and the seat of a piano unification of the picture plane into a stable pictorial Encaustic on newspaper and cloth over canvas stool. A wooden strip attached to an incomplete box frame invades the interior sanctuary composition. All these painted blockages can be read as surmounted by four tinted-plaster faces in wood box with hinged front. Overall, with box open, of the composition, calling attention to the assembled, three-dimensional thickness traces of the missing material thing, the wooden con- 33 5/8 x 26 x 3 in. (85.3 x 66 x 7.6 cm); canvas 26 x 26 in. of the work and making it impossible to subsume objects into images. In the other early struction in the center of the untitled assemblage. I sug- (66 x 66 cm); box (closed) 3 3/4 x 26 x 3 1/2 in. (9.5 x 66 x 8.8 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, assemblage (plate 31), arbitrarily placed photographs, clippings, and objects maintain gested the same replacement or erasure of things by New York. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Robert C. Scull. their legibility over and against a flurry of paint smears and drips that, in some areas, images in the shift from Them Apples, with its evocations

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in paint of Johns’s incorporation of real objects into his works, to its untitled partner. explicitness in modernist painting from Manet to Stella represents Stella’s assemblage practice moved from his apprehension of a work like Johns’s Target nothing more nor less than the gradual apprehension of the basic with Four Faces to his first experiments in assemblage at Princeton to Them Apples and “truth” that paintings are in no essential respect diMerent from its less obdurately materialist reprise. Likewise, in his painting practice, his canvases other classes of objects in the world.78 made increasingly fewer concessions to their own collage eMect (Grape Island and Coney Island as compared to West Broadway, or Morro Castle versus the later Arundel Castle, The “version of modernism” to which Fried refers is, ultimately, Greenberg’s own, and for example). Over the course of 1958, Stella acknowledged and eMectively repressed precisely the one that allowed him to consider a blank canvas a picture. That nexus of the facticity of the thing in art—a disavowal repeated by those on both sides of the undiMerentiated things that Fried recognizes Stella’s paintings as courting (and from minimalist polemic as it would escalate in the following decade. which he wishes to redeem them) threatens to dissolve their singular identity into their We have seen Fried’s anxiety when faced with what he felt were the brute, ambient setting or situation (as Fried called it in “Art and Objecthood,” emphasizing opaque, or, at worst, mere things that constituted minimalist art. The autonomy and the theatrical charge of such a mise-en-scène) or, worse, into an unspecified, infinite alterity of the thing, as that which is wholly other to the human, perceiving subject, array of still other, equally opaque, equally unknowable things. What is it that painting, was cause for critical corrective measures by Fried and many minimalist artists, measures specifically Stella’s painting, must hide, lest its aknity to other things or objects that would assert or restore the subject’s position in its encounter with the art object, become legible? and by extension, the world of things. In 1965, the year his exhibition Three American Most of Stella’s paintings from 1958 exhibit in paint the same anxiety toward the Painters: , Jules Olitski, Frank Stella opened at the Fogg Art Museum, thing that Leo Steinberg expressed after his initial encounter with Johns’s early work at Fried was already grappling with the central question of his negative manifesto “Art and Castelli that same year. The source of this anxiety for Steinberg, when faced with Target Objecthood,” a question Stella’s work particularly provoked: Is a painting a thing like with Four Faces, was an “uncanny inversion of values,” particularly of spatial rela- any other? tionships between viewing subjects and things. In Steinberg’s 1962 account, the target, which according to its actual use should be placed at some remove from the shooter, [Stella’s] progression from black to aluminum to copper metallic instead fills the picture plane and is inescapably “here.” The human face, to be recog- paint in his first three series of paintings, in conjunction with his use nizable as such, demands intimacy and closeness (“as soon as you recognize a thing as a of shaped canvases in the latter two series, can be fitted neatly into face, it is an object no longer, but one pole in a situation of reciprocal consciousness”), a version of modernism that regards the most advanced painting but the four faces sequestered in a boxed compartment at the work’s upper margin are of the past hundred years as having led to the realization that paint- far away, “there.” And yet those who might have expressed outrage over the disfigure- ings are nothing more than a particular subclass of things, invested ment of the faces, their expressionless repetition, monochrome masking, and equation by certain conventional characteristics (such as their tendency to with the impassivity of the bull’s-eye “just weren’t around.” This “thing” (the artwork in consist of canvas stretched across a wooden support, itself rectangu- question) was able to exist by virtue of some kind of neglect: “I felt that the leveling of lar in most instances), whose arbitrariness, once recognized, argues those categories, which are the subjective markers of space, implied a totally nonhuman for their elimination. According to this view, the assertion of the point of view. It was as if the subjective consciousness, which alone can give meaning to literal character of the picture support manifested with growing ‘here’ and ‘there,’ had ceased to exist....In the end, these pictures by Jasper Johns

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fig 32. Robert Morris, Untitled (Stadium), 1967 (1993 come to impress me as a dead city might—but a dead city of terrible familiarity. Only refabrication). Painted steel, configuration of eight objects are left—man-made signs which, in the absence of men, have become objects. units. Four straight wedges: 47 1/2 in. x4 ft. x471/2 in. (120.7 x 121.9 x 120.7 cm). Four round wedges: And Johns has anticipated their dereliction....I am alone with this thing.”79 47 1/2 in. x 7 ft. 1 in. x 47 1/2 in. (120.7 x 215.9 x The shifters that locate the subject’s place in the world—“here” and “there”— 120.7 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Panza Collection, 1991, 91.3795. have become unhinged, producing a “subject that’s got out of control”—that is, a sub- ject that has lost its bearings or feelings of mastery, its certainty of its place in a given situation.80 And without any means to express his or her relationship to the thing, the perceiving subject is shut out: Johns’s systems or “single things,” as Steinberg calls them, are total and impenetrable. Johns’s refusal to mitigate the discomfort and imagined threat that the thing posed for the self-conscious human subject was not just a cause for concern to mod- ernist critics like Steinberg and Fried; it also contradicted the minimalist desire for objects that a subject could interact with. This desire is articulated most explicitly by the early minimalist objects of Robert Morris. Morris designed simple, unitary forms of subdued monochrome colors devoid of textural incident or complex part-to-whole relationships in order to better communicate a holistic gestalt impression (fig. 32). For Morris the perceptive, peripatetic human body was the constant against which his objects were measured, whereas for Johns the body was severed from its ability to serve as such a standard.81 Morris’s objects eschew intimacy, a fact that Fried found particularly objectionable: “The largeness of the piece, in conjunction with its nonrelational, unitary character, distances the beholder—not just physically but psychically. It is, one might say, precisely this distancing that makes the beholder a subject and the piece in question...an object.” But it does not, it is important to distinguish, make it a thing. Proximity and distance, here and there, are rendered meaningless by things. For the purposes of this discussion, we might imagine an object to be that which implies or begs interaction— indeed, is defined by the promise of such a mutual relationship. A thing, on the other hand, is a material entity that can exist autonomously, independent of any relation- ship to the body or perception.82 Although Johns’s artworks were obviously created with the idea that someone would see them, they nevertheless make uncomfortable allusions to things, as Steinberg’s anxious response might suggest.

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Morris cannot allow the thing into his practice any more than Fried can articulate it is crucial to distinguish), Stella assuaged anxiety about the threat of the thing by it in his essay, and this repression is all the more striking in Morris’s blatant early sublimating that threat. For what an object restores is the subject that the thing had cast misreading of Johns’s work as “scientistic”: out, retaining the thing’s materiality in order to redeem it. Boehm’s designation of Stella’s Black paintings as Bild-Dinge (image-things) is useful here, though I believe the But one of the worst and most pretentious of these intimacy- term could also apply to the 1958 works: “The impenetrability of the Black paintings... making situations in some of the new work is the scientistic element evokes an experience in which the emptiness of pictorial profundity topples in the face that shows up generally in the application of mathematical or of the positivity of something simply given. Stella’s artifacts are Bild-Dinge, images in engineering concerns to generate or inflect images. This may have transition over and away from themselves toward the object.” The vacuity of Stella’s worked brilliantly for Jasper Johns (and he is the prototype for abstraction flirts with the kind of emptiness that Steinberg accords to Johns’s thingly this kind of thinking) in his number and alphabet paintings, in which constructions, yet in their approach to a positive objecthood—never fully consummated the exhaustion of a logical system closes out and ends the image —they pass over this chasm. It is the experience of the viewer, as Boehm avers, that and the picture....The better new work takes relationships out of keeps these works from becoming pure things: “The singleness of the picture as a sole the work and makes them a function of space, light, and the thing is for this reason not easy to assert given the experience of the viewer.”84 viewer’s field of vision. The object is but one of the terms in the The 1958 works by Stella function as a Freudian fetish, one that would mask (even newer esthetic....One is more aware than before that he himself is while expressing) the trauma Johns’s work seemed to provoke for his audience. If the establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various human subject is being figuratively rendered impotent by the utterly incomprehensible positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context. things that constitute Johns’s work at this time, then Stella’s paintings enable a fun- Every internal relationship...tends to eliminate the viewer to the damental repression necessary for Fried, and indeed for diverse minimalists like Judd or degree that these details pull him into an intimate relation with the Morris, if the sovereignty of the perceiving subject is to be preserved. In Freud’s con- work and out of the space in which the object exists. ception, “Both the disavowal and the akrmation of the castration have found their way into the constitution of the fetish itself.”85 The Johnsian thing implies a cancellation It is as though Johns’s works, as opposed to minimalist objects, were black holes, of the human subject that both Fried and minimalist avatars must disavow. Stella’s work vacuums that would tease the viewer into coming closer only to “eliminate” him or her. can operate as a fetish because it both denies Johns’s cancellation of the human The minimalist object, on the other hand, can engage in a relationship with the subject and akrms that it has already happened (in his initial encounter with Johns’s viewer; more important, it can engage in a relationship the viewer can control, can assemblage in 1958). The ambiguity that is central to Freud’s formulation of the fetish— “establish.”83 Hierarchical relations still exist, though this time between subject and that it contains both disavowal and akrmation—permeated the reception of Stella’s object. Morris masks this hierarchy and his anxiety about the Johnsian thing by accusing work, which was seen as both minimalist object and modernist painting from the debut Johns, in the same passage, of employing science in the service of “Cubist esthetics,” of his Black paintings. that is, relational, “European” painting. Freud’s discussion of the pathology of the fetish can explain the critical neglect of In his deft reconfiguration and reinterpretation of Johns’s practice, in his Stella’s 1958 works, that is, those most engaged with Johns. Nearly all discussions of maneuvering from “thingness” to “objecthood” (two conditions Fried conflates but that Stella’s first 1958 works stress the impact of Johns’s example on the young painter.

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William Rubin, reviewing Stella’s work in 1970, chides Fried for “omitting the crucial influ- painter.” Johns’s signs, his targets and flags (what Steinberg calls “a single thing”) or his ence of Jasper Johns” in favor of a misleading relationship between Stella and Barnett maps and alphabets (“a full set”), by virtue of their hermetic completeness divorced Newman in his “Three American Painters” essay of 1965. For Rubin, Fried is able to from any context of actual use, lack the situational, anthropomorphic allusion contained repress Johns precisely because he begins his account of Stella’s history with his first series in the word house—an allusion that suggests that Stella is domesticating the Johnsian of paintings, the Black paintings. To acknowledge the 1958 works would be to acknowl- thing. Stella opened his Pratt lecture by observing, “There are two problems in painting. edge the specter of Johns and the anxiety of the thing that his works held for viewers One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. like Steinberg. Yet Rubin is no more willing to do this than Fried, for he calls attention to The first is learning something and the second is making something.” He claimed to Johns only in order to distance Stella from the legacy of abstract expressionism, which have accomplished this by looking at paintings and imitating other painters but then after Johns seemed exhausted. Steinberg had also suggested that Johns permanently admitted that he had encountered another pair of problems, one “spatial,” and the undermined the abstract-expressionist ethos by demonstrating that the brushwork of de other “methodological”: Kooning, for example, was “after all a subject matter of a diMerent kind” and that the ambitions of abstract expressionists to banish what Greenberg called “sculptural” illu- In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, sionism had failed. It is remarkable how these sentiments resemble Judd’s 1962 esti- i.e., the balancing of the various parts with and against each other. mation of Stella’s own accomplishment on that score: “The absence of illusionistic space The obvious answer was symmetry—make it the same all over. The in Stella, for example, makes abstract expressionism seem now an inadequate style, question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A sym- makes it appear a compromise with representational art and its meaning.”86 metrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on an open Only Jones, in the first study published of the 1958 works, had begun to under- ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I stand Stella’s encounter with Johns: “The stripes, the serial motifs, the repetition— arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only these are the aspects of Johns’s work that would last in Stella’s work, and they were the know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the qualities that Stella and his historians would valorize, reinforcing his historical position painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The as progenitor of Minimalism rather than as epigone of Neo-....But there are remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application strong indications that at first it was the object quality of Johns’s work that most aMected which followed and complemented the design solution. This was Stella.” Another commentator who suggested that Stella is closer to the world of done by using the house painter’s technique and tools.88 things than he would admit was Philip Leider, who, in his review of Stella’s first retro- spective at moma in 1970, questioned the artist’s rationale for his proclivity for his Illusionistic space within painting, especially the “relational painting” that Stella and deep stretchers: “What then is Stella really liking about the eMect of that deep stretcher? Judd explicitly denigrated as essentially European, is a metaphor for real space, where It is the object quality they give to the picture, and if he does not say so it would things and human subjects collide. By banishing this metaphor from his work, Stella seem to be again because of his hesitation about the ultimate quality of any literalist follows Greenberg and makes his painting more true to its medium (that is, more flat, innovation, even his own.”87 superficial, two-dimensional). In doing so, like all modernist painters, he risks declaring Perhaps the fundamental diMerence between Johns and Stella, despite their that painting is an object itself, not something that presumes in some way to contain undeniable connection, is the diMerence between a “sign-painter” and a “house- or signify other objects within its frame. Modernist painting as examined by both

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Greenberg and Fried walks a fine line in that it must resist spatial illusionism within its engendered future possibilities for both modernist painting and minimalism. If Johns’s frame without fully collapsing into the real space of the viewer. The modernist painting work touched the void—the “death of painting” in a “dead city”—then Stella’s painting is thus alienated from the viewer, but this is not to say that it threatens to throw the ingested its lesson, taking one protective step back from the edge so that debates over beholder into the kind of crisis Johns’s inscrutable, closed things do. Real space, while paintings and objects could continue under watchful human eyes. separate from the modernist painting, nevertheless belongs to the viewing subject, as Fried avers.89 It does not belong to painting (which exists, according to Fried, in a state of grace), nor, as Steinberg implies, does it belong to things. It is their immersion in this space of the beholder that Fried objects to in “literal- ist” works: “Someone has merely to enter the room in which a literalist work has been placed to become that beholder, that audience of one—almost as if the work in question has been waiting for him. And inasmuch as literalist work depends on the beholder, is incomplete without him, it has been waiting for him. And once he is in the room the work refuses, obstinately, to let him alone—which is to say, it refuses to stop confronting him, distancing him, isolating him. (Such isolation is not solitude any more than such confrontation is communion.)”90 Fried suggests that it is in the processual nature of their “waiting” in space that these objects both rely on and berate the subjectivity of the beholder. In their refusal to shut the viewer out completely, they prolong the interaction between subject and object, an interaction that makes the beholder aware of his or her isolation amid alien objects. Fried does not deny the priority of the perceiving subject in real space and in this respect, at least, finds common ground with the minimalists he criticizes. Yet it is precisely because he is aware of the quotidian inevitability of this kind of priority that he seeks to locate modernist painting somewhere else.91 However, Fried’s “somewhere else” also reserves a place for viewer subjectivity: Fried is far from consigning modernist painting to the realm of Johns’s works, where the thing is in control and proximity and distance have collapsed. Stella would have the viewer locate his paintings in either the real space of the literalist object or the rarefied stratum of modernist painting. But both these locales make room for the human subject, which the assemblages of Johns will not allow. As hotly debated as the “fight for Stella’s soul” was, his Johnsian works from 1958, with their assumption and subse- quent dissipation of the traumatic thing and the inhuman world it threatened to portend,

58 59 Notes Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

1. During our examination of this painting, Harry comment in light of Andre’s response in Fried 1998, figure projected against the horizon-line of a nascent sense of trying to make myself as great as they were, Meyer notes that they developed “the narrative describe in detail the kinds of paintings he made in Cooper called to my attention nail holes puncturing the “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 70–71, n. 67. On ground.” Suggesting that these paintings’ flatness but by following in that tradition. The sense of presented in redacted form in the famous ‘Modernist New York (which are the “box” or “door” composi- bottom of the boards at the base of the work (the Greenberg, see Fried et al. 1987, 73, and Fried 1998, (their eradication of figure-ground relationships) ren- belonging to a tradition and having that feeling of Painting’ (1960).” tions over striped fields), the paints he used, and the physical “posts” in the post-and-lintel reading), sug- “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 46. ders them more objectlike, she turns Fried’s use of continuity are very important to me.” 27. Solomon 1966, take 5, pp. 4–5. The place-holding structural problems he wished to solve (Solomon gesting that if they were not there when Stella 5. Glaser 1964, 157. Lucy Lippard edited this version “flatness” (that which makes a painting less material, 18. Stella 1986, 162. “Name” appears in the transcript of this recording 1966, take 6, pp. 2–3). See also the Pratt sheet (fig. began making the piece, then perhaps the strip frame (first published in 1966 in Art News) of what was less like an object) against itself to claim Stella’s 19. Solomon 1966, unnumbered take, p. 3. session. Because this excerpt did not make the final 20), whose first group of sketches shows a diagram for once continued around the whole work, which originally a radio panel entitled “The New Nihilism or paintings for a “Minimalist art.” Yet she goes on to 20. Stella 1986, 164. cut of the film, it is unclear to whom Stella referred, a painting that is very close to Perfect Day for Banana would enhance the impression of a compartment for New Art?” (recorded in 1964); Flavin’s contribution argue that it is precisely this overture to illusion in 21. Whereas Stella himself employed copying and or whether he was naming a specific figure at all. Fish, with its upper register of alternating stripes the “apple” forms. was removed at his own urging (Meyer 2001, 285, the form of the cross that throws the status of these replication in both his 1958 work and his serial practice Elaine de Kooning, a regular contributor to this feature, and a left-of-center vertically oriented rectangular 2. Stella could not be further from the Cézanne n. 55). Stella claimed that he was never consulted “flat” paintings as objects into relief (and into the in order to undermine originality and the singularity was equally able to parody it (and the contemporary form (which in the actual painting is made up of a described in ’s 1968 essay “The Apples about the edits (Tillim 1969, 1). I draw exclusively on public space of the viewer). of the masterpiece, the “second-generation” painters vogue for increasingly reductive art), as she did in column of vaguely discrete, Rothko-esque rectangles of Cézanne: An Essay on the Meaning of Still Life.” the recording (“New Nihilism” 1964), though when a 10. Guberman 1995, 46. mimicked de Kooning’s or Kline’s gesture without “Pure Paints a Picture,” Art News 56, no. 4 (1957): 57, and atmospheric bands), and for another image, Schapiro upholds the primacy of the artist’s subjectiv- citation exists that has been accurately transcribed in 11. Lawrence Rubin (1986, 34–63) lists thirty “pre- questioning those artists’ belief that such a gesture 86–87, a piece that Stella later called “the best most closely related to Plum Island (Luncheon on the ity, reading apples as both deeply personal for the far more readily available version printed in the Black Paintings” and “Transitional Paintings” from had the power to signify artistic authenticity. On article I ever read on pure painting and all that” Grass), that appears to consist of softly delineated, Cézanne (at times signifying his frustrated erotic desire) Battcock anthology (Glaser 1964), I give that citation. 1958. However, the work Rubin identifies as cat. 26 is this topic, see especially Leider 1966, 23, 36, and (Glaser 1964, 163). For Stella on Jasper Johns: Solomon repeating horizontal stripes, with one stripe singled out and a habitual motif that belongs to the artist, so 6. See Waldman 1970, 8. Remarking on the winter of a gestural painting more in keeping with Stella’s W. Rubin 1970, 25–26. For a discussion of Stella’s work 1966, take 5, p. 3. The ellipses after “definite thing” with such emphasis as to make it seem like a horizon. that every apple in any subsequent painting must refer 1958 when Andre shared Stella’s studio at 366 West student work from earlier years. Rubin does not cata- as a break with abstract expressionism, see Sandler and “in my life” appear in the transcript. 32. Stella later recalled that in his thesis he had back to his work. But Schapiro’s recognition that the Broadway, Waldman notes that “Andre has character- logue two canvases listed by Caroline A. Jones, B 1978, 307–10. 28. On Johns’s inclusion in this exhibition (open March invited a comparison between Celtic illumination and apple can “satisfy a multitude of requirements”— ized this time as a period when he was a student (plate 5) and Mary Lou Douches with Pine-Scented 22. McCoy 1981, 8–11. Seitz’s dissertation was later 10–April 28, 1957), see Bernstein 1975, 21: “[Green Jackson Pollock on the topic of “how decoration that Cézanne’s still lifes of apples could read as “arbi- of Stella.” Lysol (plate 35; Jones 1996, 131). published as the book Abstract Expressionist Painting Target] was the only one of his paintings selected for becomes art when it ceases to be just decoration” trary assemblages” or that still life more generally is 7. Glaser 1964, 160. Stella’s move from his initially 12. W. Rubin 1970, 12, 59. Johns’s choice of subjects is in America (1983). In Tillim 1969, 18, Stella recalls the show, most likely because it could be viewed (Tillim 1969, 25). However, in a copy of the thesis in “a culmination of a tendency to view the painting vociferous assertion of the objectlike quality of his by no means unmotivated, however. For discussions that only he and Bannard were in the studio course, as an abstract painting for those who wanted to see it the Frank Stella Papers (box 4, series 2) at the Archives itself as a material thing” and “is, in a sense, timeless, work to this hesitation to subscribe to a position regarding his taste for the outmoded, see Orton 1994 but Bannard recounts that there were other students that way.” Perhaps the fact that this collaged work of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, ...the space...no labeled locality” (Schapiro 1978, that would be defined by that quality alone is more and Shannon 2003. in the class, adding that at times his conversations could “pass” as an abstract painting was part of the D.C., I failed to find any mention of Pollock. On paints 13, 14, 23)—can usefully be applied to Stella’s use of obvious in the “New Nihilism” recording. 13. W. Rubin 1970, 59. See also Krauss 1974, 37, and with Stella were so involved that it felt as though they appeal for Stella. Bernstein notes that more overt as found objects see Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 2. facture, color, and materials in Them Apples. Schapiro’s 8. Leider 1966, 24. Haskell 1984, 92. Haskell’s repetition of this misguided were the only people present (letter to the author, assemblage works, such as Target with Plaster Casts, 33. Cummings 1979, 177, 182. Andre remembers working comment also recalls Leo Steinberg’s estimation of 9. Boehm 1977, 14. As if to exaggerate this eMect of interpretation of the relationship between Johns’s January 27, 2005). White Flag, and perhaps Tango (all 1955), were sup- in the same Andover studio with Stella; he described Jasper Johns’s assemblages, which I discuss at the con- facture, Stella recast three of the Black paintings’ com- images and their physical support privileges Flag at the 23. Fried, conversation with the author, January posed to be included in this exhibition but were the paintings Stella was making as “sort of abstract clusion of this essay. If Stella is referencing Cézanne positions in small collages, substituting burglar alarm expense of his more blatantly assembled works as well 20, 2005. rejected in favor of the more abstract Green Target— expressionist brush studies on paper and so forth,” and still life, it may be for these reasons. For other tape for his painted stripes. An illusion of depth is as paintings that do not exhibit a deductive structure. 24. Tillim 1969, 23: see also a review of Stella’s figure the first work by Johns that Leo Castelli saw; he heavily influenced by Kline. He remembers “seeing at readings of this piece, see Jones 1996, 133. most evident in his small collage of “Die Fahne Hoch!” 14. Jones 1996, 133. studies at the Little Gallery (and Greene’s attendant famously did not recognize it as a target (Bernstein the time, in 1952 or 1953, a show of Franz Kline 3. Meyer 2001, 121. Rosalind E. Krauss (1993, 248) dis- (1959), in which vertically running strips of tape catch 15. Reynolds 1991, 17. praise) in The Daily Princetonian 81, no. 1 (February 21, 1975, 219–20, n. 55). drawings in one of the galleries in Boston that were cusses Stella’s attraction to Jackson Pollock’s use of the light and force the horizontal tapes to recede 16. Stella 1986, 162. 1957). Bannard, letter to the author, January 13, 2005. 29. Geelhaar 1980, 19; W. Rubin 1970, 12. Johns’s done on telephone directory pages. So Frank was metallic paint, which Stella described as “repellent” in in shadow (see L. Rubin 1986, p. 90, cat. 50). To my 17. De Antonio n.d., 8. Among numerous references to Stella remembers another assemblage, now lost, to show was on view January 20–February 8, 1958. doing drawings like that.” his interview with Emile de Antonio for the 1972 film knowledge, Boehm was the first commentator to Dove and Hartley in interviews with Stella, see de which he attached a monkey squeeze toy: the viewer 30. Art News (January 1958): 5; Porter 1958, 20. 34. Reynolds 1991, 44. On the “childlike” qualities of . Krauss posits that the material point out the optical illusion of diagonal lines on the Antonio n.d., 5–6 (this transcript probably comes from was invited to squeeze a trigger and the monkey 31. Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 1. The title for Plum Johns’s work, see Steinberg 1972, “Jasper Johns: The repugnance of the paint is at odds with its shimmer- surface of the cruciform-patterned Black paintings. takes for de Antonio’s 1972 film Painters Painting); would clap its hands (conversation with the author, Island (Luncheon on the Grass) comes from an island First Seven Years of His Art,” 24. Writing on Porter’s ing, visual brilliance, noting that Stella’s materialist In an earlier essay, however, Rosalind Krauss (1973, 47) Stella 1986, 164; and especially Berman 1983, 74. There March 7, 2005). oM Newburyport, Massachusetts, and Edouard review, John Yau (1992, 126) states that “Porter proposes reading of Pollock “went in large part unnoticed; and discussed the residual illusionistic space in Stella’s Stella is quoted as saying, “For me, American painting 25. Tillim 1969, 23. Manet’s modernist masterpiece Déjeuner sur l’herbe that Johns’s paintings are connected to a state of his own use of metallic paint would itself be gath- Black and Aluminum paintings bearing the cross con- began with the early American abstractionists and 26. Fried 1998, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” (1863). For more on the dual title of this painting, looking that is innocent; and that he functions like a ered into the sublimatory embrace of ‘opticality.’” figuration: “The Cross itself relates to that most prim- culminated with Pollock and de Kooning. I would like 4. For more detail on the content of the Gauss see Rosenblum 1971, 55, n. 2. After the passage in the child who is not yet aware of the meaning of the 4. Fried et al. 1987, 79. See Fried’s softening of this itive sign of an object in space: the vertical of the to be a successor to Dove and Pollock. Not in the Seminars, see also Meyer 2001, 124, 291 nn. 27–28. Solomon interview cited above, Stella went on to ‘things’ he incorporates into his work. In retrospect,

60 61 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

...Porter’s recognition of ‘innocence’ helped lay the or that you always get into with people that want essay for Art and Culture demonstrate Greenberg’s 2005. Bannard rejects the notion that the thick stretch- Robert Mallary, Louise Nevelson, and Richard Stan- Frank Stella (1958–62), yet both series were, for groundwork for such later claims as Johns’s detach- the old values in painting (essentially, they’re all the “defense of sculptural illusionism” at the expense of ers make the paintings more objectlike. kiewicz. See Jones 1996, 114, for another interpretation Frampton, explorations in various photographic ment and formally-rooted refusals to evoke meaning.” humanistic values), is that they always find on the the specific literalness of the medium, which he 48. Richardson 1976, 4; Geelhaar 1980, 32; Jones of these comments in light of biographical facts of “clichés” (Jenkins and Krane 1984, 46). The Okcial Likewise, Robert Rosenblum (1971, 11) refers to this canvas, if you pin them down—there’s always some- initially praised. 1996, 136. Stella’s life. Portraits series also includes photos of Bannard, trope of childlike conception in connection with the thing there more than actually the paint on the can- 43. Greenberg 1993, “The Case for Abstract Art” (1959), 49. Geelhaar 1980, 22, 31. In conversation with the 55. Miller 1959, 6; W. Rubin 1960, 25 (the other artists Andre, and the architect Richard Meier (who had also initial reception of Stella’s Black paintings: “They vas. In other words,...any kind of really felt opinion 80, 81. For a more detailed discussion of the sub- author, March 7, 2005, Stella recalled that he “started” in Sixteen Americans were Jay De Feo, , shared the West Broadway studio, painting abstract- seemed to defy interpretation. To most eyes they has it that there’s always something there more than limation of the body (and, by extension, of objecthood) Delta at West Broadway, implying that he finished James Jarvaise, Landes Lewitin, Richard Lytle, Robert expressionist parodies) (Bannard, letter to the appeared monotonously simple and inert, a bewil- what’s actually there. And certainly my paintings are into the optical, see Krauss 1993, 246–47. it there as well. Mallary, Julius Schmidt, and Albert Urban); Genauer author, January 28, 2005; Guberman 1995, 42; see dering impoverishment of art in which the only unit sort of based on the fact that only what’s there is 44. Fried 1998, “An Introduction to My Art Criticism,” 50. Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 3; see Glaser 1964, 149. 1959, 26; on Frampton’s authorship see Jones 1996, 119; also Jenkins and Krane 1984, 53). was a regular black stripe and the only compositional there. And that makes it an object, I mean, because 19–23. In this group of “colorists,” Fried specifically 51. On Luncheon on the Grass, see the notes accom- Stella [Frampton] 1959. In Glaser 1964, 160, Stella 58. W. Rubin 1970, 26. For a brief history of the success principle a numbing symmetry as obvious as a child’s it really is an object. And I think anyone who actually mentions Barnett Newman, ClyMord Still, Mark panying the sketch Stella made for a lecture at Pratt took this further, disavowing the bare canvas: “I don’t and critical acclaim of the second generation, see idea of a formal garden.” does it or gets involved enough in it finally has to Rothko, Jackson Pollock, and their heirs: Helen Institute (fig. 20; transcribed in Richardson 1976, 79), get a very strong sense of the material quality of Sandler 1978, 256–77. For Stella on the second gener- 35. Cummings 1979, 184, 190; Greenberg 1993, 131–32. face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he’s Frankenthaler, , and Kenneth Noland. On and my discussion of this painting below. Them the canvas. It sort of disappears.” ation: de Antonio n.d., 9. 36. Greenberg 1993, 90; Duve 1990, 256. doing—he’s making a thing.” Responding to Glaser’s Stella’s opticality, see Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 3. See Apples is inscribed in Stella’s hand, “West Broadway, 56. W. Rubin 1970, 42–44; Stella remembers that it 59. Duve 1990, 246; Greenberg 1993, 86; Meyer 37. Fried 1998, “An Introduction to My Art question as to whether he wants his paintings to be also Stella’s explicit mention of opticality in Leider O.K.” Stella’s inscription on the back of the untitled was his decision to show Miller and Castelli only 2001, 126. Criticism,” 36. “felt as a three-dimensional presence,” Stella is both 1966, 25: “I want to make the paintings as direct assemblage from the Wexner Center for the Arts, “Stella Black paintings (conversation with the author, April 60. Richardson 1976, 12. The title Delta could refer to 38. Fried 1998, “Shape as Form” (1966), 88. For an adamant and equivocal: “Actually, that’s the one as possible. I want to make them simple and I want fecit AD MCMLIX,” suggests that he finished the work 20, 2005). John Myers, director of Tibor de Nagy the Mississippi Delta and the trip Stella took to New alternative reading of the work of Donald Judd that thing I don’t want. I think all of that should be taken to make them clear. And one of the reasons I want in 1959 while he was immersed in his Black paintings Gallery, arranged for Stella to be included in the Orleans in the summer of 1956. Morro Castle was an complicates Fried’s (and Judd’s own) estimation of for granted. I mean basically I think the discussion of to do that is that I believe that there is a value to series. Although this is a possibility, Fried dismisses gallery’s show without ever having visited the studio American steamer that burned oM the coast of Asbury his relation to illusion, see Krauss 1966. Fried (1998, 88) the thing as object is, in a sense, ridiculous—I mean, visual stimulation or opticality or whatever you want it given his recollection of Stella’s practice at the time to see the work. See Solomon 1966, take 8, pp. 4–5: Park, New Jersey, on its way to Havana, September 8, notes Stella’s own role in developing the literalist particularly as a painter. I mean, the painting is—I to call it—the direct sort of visual experience.” (conversation with the author, January 20, 2005); “Leo Castelli managed to come down with Dorothy 1934: 134 people perished (ibid., 22). sensibility of an artist like Judd in “Shape as Form”: don’t know—a painting. The thing that I would like to 45. Stella, conversation with author, March 7, 2005; Stella’s own memories counter this assertion (conver- Miller, they came simultaneously to see my paintings.” 61. Richardson 1976, 41; Geelhaar 1980, 22. Translation “Because Frank Stella’s stripe paintings, especially see is, sort of—if the thing is either lean enough, see Jones 1996, 131. Jones does not include Red River sation with the author, March 7, 2005). In a more romantic vein in an interview some years mine. Only one later composition is actually repre- those executed in metallic paint, represent the most accurate enough, or right enough you would just be Valley on her list of Eldridge Street works though it 52. Richardson 1976, 4. Richardson cites another later, Stella recalls he was introduced to Castelli by sented in this drawing, the allover diagonals of Sabine equivocal and conflictless acknowledgment of literal able to look at it. In other words, all I want anyone to also bears an Eldridge Street inscription. Salinger story from the same volume, Nine Stories, as his friend and Princeton art history professor Robert Pass (1962) from the Benjamin Moore series. One shape in the history of modernism, they have been get out of my paintings or all I ever get out of them is 46. See Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 1, where Stella talks a possible influence on the title The Marriage of Rosenblum: “I told him I had some good pictures can also recognize an upside-down Reichstag and the crucial to the literalist view I have just adumbrated” the fact that you can see it all without any confusion. about the thick stretcher in the context of his final Reason and Squalor (1959), “For Esmé—with Love and and said, ‘I think these are good enough; would you centralized diamond pattern of the Black painting Jill [emphasis added]. On the aknity of the “Specific In that sense, what you see is what you see.” months at Princeton (at the same time that Stephen Squalor” (Richardson 1976, 46). ask Leo to come down to my studio?’ Then Leo called (1959), but with the corners reserved, much like Reich- Object” and angels in a diMerent light, see Robert 40. Solomon 1966, take 6, p. 3. Greene suggested he start using cotton duck). The 53. Richardson 1976, 4–11, 64. For detailed commentary me up one day and said he wanted to come down: stag’s own “left over areas,” which I discuss below. Smithson in conversation with Dennis Wheeler (Smith- 41. Solomon 1966, take 7, p. 2. See also Leider 1966, title Colorado probably comes from Colorado Springs, on the titles of the Black paintings, see Richardson I think he showed up in the dark of the night, for 62. The Reichstag is the German parliament building; son 1996, 212) and also his 1969 “Incidents of Mirror- 30–31, for another example of the importance of this the hometown of Stella’s college friend and biogra- 1976, 3–11. some reason I could never understand” (Corbett 1983, it was burned on February 27, 1933, and became a Travel in the Yucatan” (in Smithson 1996, 122): “Once concept for Stella while he was making the Irregular pher Sidney Guberman. In the summer of 1956, after 54. See Rosenblum 1983, 95: “One of my late ’50s 60). Stella, learning that Johns and Rauschenberg symbol for the Nazis’ subsequent coup; Arbeit Macht you start seeing objects in a positive or negative Polygons and moving away from stripe painting. his sophomore year, Stella hitchhiked from his parents’ black paintings is named after the Seven Steps Café, had received an advance on their work, demanded the Frei (Work makes you free) was a slogan posted at the way you are on the road to derangement. Objects are 42. Greenberg 1993, 59–61. This article was signifi- summer house in Ipswich, Massachusetts, intending to but I didn’t hang out there; it was a dyke bar. I only same and was subsequently paid $75 a week. entrance to the Auschwitz camp; and “Die Fahne phantoms of the mind, false as angels.” Smithson’s cantly modified from an essay from 1948 entitled go to Los Angeles; he got as far as Colorado, where walked by it, but it was big in Carl Andre’s imagi- 57. “Three Young Americans” 1959, 19 (Andre is not Hoch!” (Flag on high!) is the first line of the “Horst analogy suggests the inseparability of illusion from “The New Sculpture” and published in Arts in June he stayed with Guberman, before returning home nation.” The Marriage of Reason and Squalor was credited as the author); Miller 1959, 76. Stella was also Wessel Lied,” an okcial Nazi Party song (Richardson material objects, as well as the crucial relationship 1958 (see volume editor’s note, Greenberg 1993, 56). via New Orleans (Guberman 1995, 22). The title Red originally a title Andre used for a drawing he made in represented in the catalogue for Sixteen Americans by 1976, 24, 26, 39). For Newman on post–World War II between objects and a viewing subject. I am indebted It was revised once more for inclusion in Art and River Valley, referring to a place on the borders of 1958 that has since been destroyed (Cummings 1979, a Frampton photograph, part of his Okcial Portraits subject matter, see Newman 1990, 95, 274. Stella took to Timothy Grundy for alerting me to these passages. Culture. Fried refers to opticality as the “prime locus” North and South Dakota and Minnesota, could come 179). Stella remembers the Onyx jazz club as a gay bar series. This portrait, Stella’s most conspicuous public note of this problem for Newman in an undated 39. “New Nihilism” 1964, specifically 23:41–25:56. Stella in Greenberg’s criticism, and refers to this essay from this trip as well. (Richardson 1976, 36). For “Art 60” see Sandler 1978, appearance to date, was in a drastically diMerent sketchbook in his papers at the Archives of American first sputters in protestation, arguing, “Any painting in particular in Fried et al. 1987, 71. See Bois 1993, 3, 47. Stella, conversation with the author, March 7, 284. The other participants in the panel, moderated mode from the series of fifty-two more private pho- Art (box 8, series 5). is an object. I mean, the argument that I always had for further discussion of how the revisions of this 2005, and Bannard, letter to the author, January 13, by Robert Goldwater, included Johns, Alfred Leslie, tographs Frampton took of Stella, The Secret World of 63. Richardson 1976, 15. Carl Andre remembers that

62 63 Objecting to Things Megan R. Luke

Stella created his “no-color” by mixing an assortment how narrow, activate an illusionistic ground for the the stripe might have another, more obvious source piece but in the certainty of accident, or perhaps in calling the work “das zum Ding gewordene Bild” (the 90. Fried 1998, 163–64. of colored paints purchased at surplus hardware right-angled figures they abut that led Stella to cut than either Diebenkorn or Johns for this particular an uncontrollable unconscious (see Joseph 2003, 191– becoming-a-thing image, 15). I am exploiting the 91. Fried ends his essay on precisely this point: “We stores on Canal Street. These paint cans had lost their away the corners in his Aluminum paintings. work: Bannard remembers seeing the 1955 exhibition 97). Them Apples and the Yale untitled piece could diMerence between Ding and Objekt in German as well are all literalists most or all of our lives. Presentness labels and therefore were discounted to one dollar 67. Fedier 1977, 25 (translation mine). The New Decade with Stella at the Whitney Museum never be mistaken for replicas of each other; nor is as English, and while Boehm does not always distin- is grace” (1998, 186). a gallon (telephone message to Harry Cooper, April 68. Jones 1996, 141; see Rosenblum 1971, 13. Fried’s of American Art, where the two were particularly struck repetition or simultaneous construction an issue here. guish between the two, his overtures to Heidegger 22, 2005). piece is inscribed, “Painted by Frank P. Stella willingly by Motherwell’s Fishes with Red Stripe (1954), an obvi- Each is already “unique,” but divided they tell only especially make clear that he uses “das Ding” in a 64. Richardson 1976, 14. Stella painted second versions 4.3.59 at 366 West Broadway New York City.” Fried ous prototype for the compositional layout of Your Lips half the story of what problems in composition, color, manner fundamentally diMerent from “das Objekt.” of Getty Tomb, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, dismisses the possibility that Stella continued to paint Are Blue (letter to the author, January 25, 2005). and materiality Stella was working out between them. While at first, given my reading, it would make more and Tomlinson Court Park for Sixteen Americans, in this colorful mode after working on the Black 74. As Stella remarked, “I liked Rothko’s softness, 78. Fried 1998, “Three American Painters” (1965), 255. sense to think of Stella’s works as Bild-Objekte, though they are not exact replicas: there is an inter- series for some months and avers that this work was bulkiness, the one image—the presence and power 79. Steinberg 1972, “Contemporary Art and the Plight Boehm’s maintenance of the presence of the “thing” stice of bare canvas in the central stripe of each an exception made for him as a sort of souvenir of one thing, but at the beginning, I didn’t realize of Its Public” (1962), 13–15. in his hybrid construction serves to reveal the ghost pattern in one version or the other of a given pair. We (conversation with the author, January 20, 2005). How- the full implications of his paintings” (W. Rubin 1970, 80. Steinberg 1972, “Jasper Johns,” 37. that haunts these paintings. could also consider the doubling patterns of Arundel ever, Bannard owns a small piece on canvasboard 10). On Plum Island and Rothko, see Rosenblum 1971, 81. Morris 1993, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2” (1966), 11. 85. Freud 1927, 156. Castle, Bethlehem’s Hospital, The Marriage of Reason consisting of alternating red and purple stripes, dated 13. Your Lips Are Blue was at one time entitled Mary 82. Fried 1998, “Art and Objecthood” (1965), 154; 86. W. Rubin 1970, 54; Steinberg 1972, “Jasper Johns,” and Squalor, Club Onyx, Seven Steps, and all the 1959. While Stella may have continued using color that Lou II (, Frank Stella Papers, Heidegger (1971, 164–65) makes a similar distinction 22. See also Fried’s review of Johns’s 1963 show at diamond-patterned Black paintings as the inscription year, in these two cases he duplicated (presumably) box 8, series 5). For references to Mary Lou Douches, between a thing and an object in “The Thing” (1951): Castelli for his opinion of Johns’s relation to the “de on the surface of these works of an impulse against earlier pieces that he believed he had lost (Bannard, see W. Rubin 1970, 151, n. 10, and Geelhaar 1980, 20. “An independent, self-supporting thing may become Kooning problem,” namely, “given one’s predilection singularity, and by extension, “firstness.” conversation with the author, March 24, 2005). The For Stella’s opinion of Motherwell: W. Rubin 1970, 151, an object if we place it before us, whether in immedi- for ‘painterly’ brushwork, how to organize the sur- 65. De Antonio n.d., 10–11. See also Leider 1966, 30, orientation of Yugatan as reproduced in this volume n. 10. ate perception or by bringing it to mind in a recol- face of the canvas so as not to yield a Cubist space” 34: “And the corners, every corner solution for the diMers from that in previous publications and exhibi- 75. Guberman 1995, 27. In conversations with the lective re-presentation. However, the thingly character (Fried 1998, “New York Letter: Johns” [1963], 290). Fried edges became more and more mannered. You just got tions, and reflects Stella’s present conviction about author both Stella (March 7, 2005) and Bannard (March of the thing does not consist in its being a represented refuses to see Johns’s assumption of de Kooning’s to see it. The classic examples of this would be how the work was originally intended to be viewed. 24, 2005) confirmed this episode. In our examination object, nor can it be defined in any way in terms painterly gesture as a critique, preferring to dwell on [Philip] Guston and Esteban Vicente, and Joan Mitchell 69. W. Rubin 1970, 10. of Plum Island, Harry Cooper and I saw what appears of the objectness...of the object.” the pathos of his belatedness, “in that the historical and Michael [Goldberg], where you get the dense 70. Tomkins 1984, 63. to be some painted text near the top of the painting, 83. Morris 1993, “Notes on Sculpture, Part 2,” 14–15. moment to which his style belongs is past” (291). center and the feathered edge. I mean it got to be like 71. Fried 1998, “Shape as Form,” 81. now hidden by green overpainting, suggesting that Morris later makes the distinction between “struc- Steinberg would assert that it is Johns, not Newman the monumental cliché...running into hundreds and 72. Jones (1996, 136) claims that Stella’s association of perhaps this work may have also been defaced (though tures,” “objects,” and “sculpture” in “Notes on Sculp- (as Fried would have it), who enables us to recognize hundreds of paintings. And yet nobody was even the color yellow with New York continues into his not by Greene). A technical study would be required ture, Part 3,” but this does not contradict what I have the pastness of de Kooning’s style. For Judd on Stella: thinking of it as a problem.” Yve-Alain Bois has sug- “last color paintings” with Astoria. He was prompted to confirm this, however. been arguing about the diMerence between thing Judd 1975, “In the Galleries: Frank Stella” (1962), 57. gested to me that one artist who may have helped to rework that painting in a monochrome mode 76. Tomkins 1984, 60. See also Solomon 1966, take 5, and object for Morris. “Structure” is his direct response 87. Jones 1996, 130; Leider 1970, 48. Stella recognize this problem was Johns. Whereas the when, commuting to Queens for a house-painting job p. 5. Tillim 1969, 9. to the publicity generated by the Jewish Museum’s 88. The entire text of Stella’s lecture is reproduced motif of Flag is coextensive with its support, the cen- during his first year in the city, he was struck by 77. A parallel with Robert Rauschenberg’s Factum I Primary Structures exhibition in 1966, whereas “sculp- in Rosenblum 1971, 57, and Richardson 1976, 78. tered bull’s-eye of Green Target, for example, does sunlight dramatically streaming in through a subway and II (1957) might be tempting here. Yet this pair by ture” describes the works he is most interested in, Where the two versions slightly diverge, I have not conform to deductive structure and thus yields car as it emerged from a tunnel. Geelhaar (1980, 26) Rauschenberg does something that, while analogous, and “objects” designates smaller, more “decorative” followed Richardson. “left over” corners. We could even imagine the Targets also akrms that Stella closely associated the black- is diMerent in kind: each of its constituent paintings works. These categories, however, are by no means 89. See Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” (1998, 159) to be diagrammatic representations of the kind of and-yellow combination with the “complexion” asserts an inevitable singularity that surfaces despite exclusive, and it is possible to imagine works conform- regarding Tony Smith’s ride on the New Jersey Turnpike: paintings with the “dense center and the feathered of New York City. an initial perception of repetition (or replication) ing to two or three of them simultaneously. “The situation established by Smith’s presence is edge” that Stella decries. 73. In the first group of diagrams on the sheet (to between the two works. They were painted simulta- 84. Boehm 1977, 15, translations mine. The idea that in each case felt by him to be his.” Or again: “That the 66. Tomkins 1984, 77. Residual figure-ground rela- which type I suggest Perfect Day for Banana Fish and neously, so that neither Factum is a copy of the other. Stella’s paintings could be objects in transition (a beholder is confronted by literalist work within a tionships are also found in Arbeit Macht Frei and “Die Plum Island belong), before the “wanderings,” Stella This exercise, while at first appearing to undermine the term used by nearly all commentators to describe the situation that he experiences as his means that there Fahne Hoch!,” whose corners are filled with rectan- does emphasize “REPETITION” as the means for getting singularity of the abstract-expressionist gesture, actu- 1958 works, though simply to describe a teleological is an important sense in which the work in question gular bands defining an interior cruciform shape. It is to “the thing itself/how a stripe/works,” a quality ally akrms a singularity (or particularity) of a diMerent progress toward the Black paintings) is most neatly exists for him alone, even if he is not actually alone precisely the fact that these corner areas, no matter he repeatedly averred he learned from Johns. Indeed, sort—one rooted not in a mythic genius or master- expressed in Boehm’s overtly Heideggerian gesture in with the work at the time” (163).

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