The New Criterion

by Karen Wilkin

It is difficult to believe that Frank Stella (1936–2024) is no longer with us. For six and a half decades, beginning with the first exhibitions of his implacable Black Paintings in 1959, when he was twenty-three, he was a powerful presence, an unignorable, demanding artist who made us all—including other artists—question our most cherished assumptions about what a painting could be. Like his friend the British sculptor Anthony Caro, who said that repeating the same thing was “too boring,” Stella refused to settle for what he had already discovered. Instead, from the start he restlessly explored the implications of whatever he had done, shifting emphases and often destroying the expectations his previous work had raised. Over the years, Stella ignored the established separation between two and three dimensions, flouted the convention of the canvas as a flat rectangle, and even tested the limits of “taste.” He questioned his own early works’ assertion that a painting was a monochrome surface, substituting raucous, multilayered, violently polychrome constructions that project into the viewer’s space or come completely off the wall. And to complicate things, these formal and conceptual adventures were enhanced or perhaps even provoked by new technologies and materials.

The Stella retrospective that inaugurated the Whitney Museum’s new Renzo Piano building in 2015 gave us this protean master almost whole, presenting a full account of his wide-ranging responses, in varied media, to his famous announcement that “There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting.” Now, we can follow the complexities of those responses at “Homage to Frank Stella,” organized by Mnuchin Gallery to commemorate the artist’s death, at eighty-seven, in May of this year.1 It’s an economical but impressive and informative selection of works from private collections and the artist’s estate. The earliest example is a work on paper made in 1958, the year Stella graduated from Princeton: a brushy, orange rectangle below horizontal stripes hints at things to come with its geometry, deadpan frontality, and restatement of the shape of the support. The most recent inclusion is a freestanding sculpture, Split Star 2 (2023), a sliced, opened-out version of the spiky cages that preoccupied Stella for his last decade or so, three-dimensional iterations of a radiating shape that he first employed in paintings and drawings in the 1960s—such as the exhibition’s multi-pronged, red-lead Port Tampa City (1963). The installation at Mnuchin also includes several slightly earlier Star sculptures, whose relentless three-dimensional symmetry is criticized by Split Star 2’s vital imbalance and the fresh interior colors revealed by the slicing.

Between these extremes, more or less chronologically arranged on the two floors of the gallery, is a remarkably comprehensive selection of some of Stella’s most compelling series, often represented by unfamiliar examples. If we pay attention, we can follow Stella’s lifelong search to “find out what painting is” and his continuous probing of the nature of pictorial space, in its broadest possible sense. The early Black Paintings are accounted for by a small but textbook example made in 1959—an intimate, domesticated version of such insistent large iterations as the exhibition’s ample, ominously titled Arbeit Macht Frei (1958), a deceptively simple work that becomes increasingly complex as we spend time with it. In contrast to the slender lines of bare canvas and steadily applied parallel bands of pigment in the best-known Black Paintings (and the Metallic series that followed), the surface of Arbeit Macht Frei seems agitated, uneasy. The black paint appears to have been applied in two directions, in opposing layers. There are suggestions of narrow reserved spaces between the bands, in the lower part of the canvas, but in the upper regions, rough, dark lines emphasize the repetitive internal divisions of the composition. The proximity of several sleek Metallic Paintings makes Arbeit Macht Frei seem even shaggier and more discomfiting, underscoring the title’s inseparable associations with the Holocaust. So much for Stella’s famous explanation “What you see is what you see.” The inflected expanse of the painting begins to read both as an embodiment of disquiet and as an update of the contingency and layering of the era’s gestural Abstract Expressionism, an approach completely refuted by the crisp elegance of better-known Black Paintings, including the show’s miniature version, and the Metallic Paintings. In addition, the audacious shaping of the exhibition’s Metallic Paintings announces Stella’s questioning of the time-honored conventions of Western art.