Frank Stella could neither draw nor paint, he himself admitted. He nevertheless managed to take the art world of the late 1950s by surprise. Stella died on Sunday at the age of 87.
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Het is één ding om de kunstwereld op z’n kop te zetten met een totaal nieuwe benadering van schilderen en zo grootheden uit te dagen als Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko en Barnett Newman. Het is weer iets anders om al als jonge twintiger een bres te slaan in hun abstract expressionisme, de toen dominante stroming in de moderne kunst. Helemaal als je zelf ruiterlijk toegeeft dat je eigenlijk niet kunt tekenen, laat staan figuurschilderen.
Het is Frank Stella, een van de succesvolste beeldend kunstenaars van zijn generatie, wonderwel gelukt. Hij was belezen, arrogant, hypercompetitief en grenzeloos ambitieus. Van gepsychologiseer over zijn schilderijen, sculpturen, murals en maquettes moest hij niets hebben. ‘Wat je ziet is wat je ziet’, werd zijn gevleugelde uitspraak uit 1966. Het zou een mantra worden van de minimalistische kunst. Stella overleed zondag op 87-jarige leeftijd in zijn huis in Manhattan aan lymfklierkanker.
Eind jaren vijftig van de vorige eeuw overrompelt Stella de kunstwereld met zijn sobere, kolossale Black Paintings: nauwkeurig afgebakende rechthoeken, rasters, strepen en vlakken van zwarte lakverf, van elkaar gescheiden door dunne lijnen van het onbewerkte doek. De doeken zijn wat ze zijn: stukken hout, bespannen met canvas, bedekt met een donkere laklaag. ‘What you see is what you see’, inderdaad.
The established order had to get used to Stella’s new visual language – many critic found his black works a bit boring when they hung in a group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1959. Many collectors miss the opportunity to purchase work that is later auctioned for millions of dollars.
Curved color bands
But that reserve would not last long. Stella also has a number of wheelbarrows, including Leo Castelli (1907-1999). This influential New York art dealer and collector represents big names such as Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Bruce Nauman and Richard Serra and counts them among his circle of friends.
In 1967 Stella exhibited work from his series Protractor (protractor) in the Leo Castelli Gallery. They are bright, curved bands of color on large canvases cut to resemble the semicircular shape of protractors. Stella gained inspiration for that series during a trip through Iran. There he became fascinated by the round and brightly colored patterns of Islamic art.
The Protractorseries is, after the subdued Black Paintings, a turning point for the minimalist artist. What Stella has done for abstract art is according to a critic of the magazine The New Yorker ‘what Bob Dylan meant to music and Andy Warhol to more or less everything’.
Stella’s name and fame are going fast. His work was shown at the Venice Biennale as early as 1964 and in 1970, at the age of 34, he became the youngest artist ever to have a solo exhibition at the MoMA. Despite sneers from some critics, mainly about his later work (from ‘disco modernism’ to ‘chessboard aesthetics’), museums around the world devote major exhibitions to his oeuvre.
Exotic carnivorous plants
Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, a town north of Boston, into an Italian-American family. In his youth he took painting classes at Phillips Academy in Andover, then earned a bachelor’s degree in history from Princeton. When he is rejected for military service, he moves to New York, aged 22. He moves into a shabby studio on West Broadway, without the stated goal of becoming an artist. He met like-minded people there, including the aforementioned Leo Castelli and the sculptor Carl Andre, who died earlier this year, with whom he shared a studio for some time.
Stella will continue to reinvent himself throughout his artistic life. From the flat and sober canvases in the fifties and sixties to postmodern, spatial, associative objects in the eighties. From a giant caterpillar crawling over a wall to exotic carnivorous plants. A series of works based on the 135 chapters of the book Moby Dick. Installations in public spaces and three-dimensional works will follow later.
Those 3D works with aluminum and fiberglass (‘maximalist paintings’, according to Stella), have something noisy, according to Stella. Volkskrant-critic Stefan Kuiper when the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg dedicates a major retrospective exhibition to Stella in 2012 on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
‘They look like monsters from a Pixar animated film, fluorescent colours, organic shapes, science fiction material. You want to admire it (…) but it still misses something: a thought, a core.’ Suddenly you see it, says Kuiper: ‘Stella does not make art. He makes art history. His work anticipates the season. It is already accompanied by a text sign with an explanation when the artist brushes the dust off his clothes.’
Frank Stella may have thought he couldn’t draw, but he certainly sensed the spirit of the times. The star stormer of the 1950s and 1960s had an eye for the impact of color, the effect of scale and the power of simple shapes such as circles, cones and squares. Rather than repeat himself, he wanted to keep moving all his life.
3x Frank Stella
“My parents spoke Italian, but I grew up during the war. Italians were very self-confident during the Second World War. There was a lot of pressure on everyone to speak English.”
“People say my paintings are always big for effect, but they’re also big so I don’t trip over myself, so I have room to work and people can come in and feel comfortable.”
“People still talk about art I made in the 1960s – most of them have never seen it, they’ve never experienced it, and they have no idea about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd .I don’t know what minimalism is!”
: ‘What you see is what you see’ | login required){kind=link}