“It was the loss of the palette, not of the easel,
that changed the face of what we see as painting.”
Frank Stella
that changed the face of what we see as painting.”
Frank Stella
Although famed for his quote “What you see is what you see” there is
more to the art of painting than what engages the eye according to American
abstract painter Frank
Stella. As he told Bomb Magazine’s Saul Ostrow, “No
art is any good unless you can feel how it’s put together. By and large it’s
the eye, the hand and if it’s any good, you feel the body. Most of the best
stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist’s body; you
can really lean on it.”
And
so it was with the first of the Black Paintings that were to make the Stella
name. He was in his early 20’s and recently resident in New York, attracted by
the cream of the abstract expressionists in the late 1950’s whose style had him
in their thrall.
As
he told the London’s Telegraph
Newspaper’s Alastair Sooke “I was working on a
particular painting, (called Delta), and I
remember I got mad at it. So I painted over it, and went to bed. When I looked
at it the next day, it didn't look that bad. All I'd done was simplify it by
painting out the bands all black. But something was happening. It had a kind of
presence. That was the beginning.”
A
year later Stella had a series of these “large, aggressive canvases covered
with stripes of black enamel paint that formed repetitive, rippling patterns.” Of which four were included the Museum of Modern
Art’s 1959 exhibition Important Sixteen Americans.
Over
the ensuing decades Stella’s stripes gave way to complex geometric designs, shaped
canvases and works on aluminium to sculptures of architectural size. Along the
way he has maintained that early gained recognition with exhibitions in prestigious
galleries and museums and prices to match.
But
it is the gesture within the painting that intrigues and goes a long way in determining
its value as art for Stella. As the New York Times reported his saying during
his Harvard University’s Charles Eliot
Norton lecturer “The life
of what one drops the brush into counts for more than the size of what one
paints on. The load of paint carried, more than the dimensions of the area to
be covered, determines the scale of the gesture.”
An exhibition of his work Frank Stella – Paintings & Drawings is currently on show at The Kunstmuseum Basel until the 30th of
August.
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