Frank Stella, born in 1936, was the Picasso of narrative abstraction and minimal art. Probably no artist in the second half of the twentieth century made more extreme changes in style and developed inspiring concepts for other painters. Barack Obama rightly awarded him the National Medal of Arts in 2010 as one of the “world’s most innovative painters and sculptors”.
In retrospect, many of Stella’s search movements can be seen as balancing processes: the “black pictures” of the late 1950s, which nevertheless always revealed differentiated geometric elements within the surfaces that were, so to speak, machine-painted with an even application of paint, followed their exact opposite, the one with large Gesture-painted abstract expressionist images such as those of Jackson Pollock.
Screamingly colorful color field painting
Barack Obama was also right in appreciating Stella equally as a painter and sculptor, because from 1960 onwards the artist changed the material of his paintings in his series of “Aluminum and Copper Paintings”, which featured warm, shimmering copper surfaces and cool, shiny and wrinkled aluminum reliefs a kind of landscape painting made of metal crystallized.
Obama presents Frank Stella with the National Medal of Arts in 2009AP
The hybrid form of the metal reliefs was then followed by a sometimes brightly colored color field painting as a balancing process. The series of “Benjamin Moore Paintings”, half-ironically dedicated to the great American paint manufacturer of the nineteenth century, also revealed Stella’s lucid humor, which was enjoyed by everyone who got to know him.
The danger of the arbitrariness of pure form
Why Stella is one of the main representatives of so-called analytical painting and hard edge is explained not least by his studies of history at Princeton and in particular with the modern art historian William C. Seitz. Both enabled him to counter the danger of the arbitrariness of pure form by anchoring it in history. The metal reliefs from the “Moby-Dick” series, which have been colorfully painted and wildly anarchist since the 1980s, are outstanding examples of abstract art that was inspired by Herman Melville’s text without appearing illustrative at all. The sheet metal formations that roll up like paper reflect the psychic energies of Captain Ahab’s hunt for the white whale, the martial version of the romantics’ search for the blue flower.
And also Stella’s large sculpture “Prince Friedrich of Homburg. A play, 3X” in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington not only bears witness to the engagement with Heinrich von Kleist, but also with literary elementary materials for coping with life in general. Stella called his sculptures “inhabitable illusions,” three-dimensional forms that protect the imagination from hardships.
In Germany, too, this search for form in history could be followed through Stella’s presence in galleries since the 1960s; Thanks to Erika Hoffmann’s collecting activities, important relief works by Stella can now be found in Dresden. Above all, thanks to the persuasion of the art historian Franz-Joachim Verspohl, professor in the Thuringian university town, Jena owns the most of Stella’s sculptures in Germany over Lothar Späth, the then boss of Carl Zeiss. The inner courtyard of the former Zeiss main factory in Jena with the five large metal sculptures from the “Hudson River Valley” series is a worthy Stella memorial. Frank Stella died on Saturday in New York at the age of 87.