Frank Stella retrospective sets a new standard for the Modern

The Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth has never looked quite so modern — in the 20th-century-modern-art way. The museum is almost exploding with 100 enormous paintings and sculptural works in “Frank Stella: A Retrospective,” which is just barely enough to encapsulate this artist’s dynamic oeuvre.

The exhibition opens Sunday and will be on display until September.

If you remember only Stella’s large canvases with interlocking protractor shapes, his most famous works, then at least you are familiar with Stella. However, several generations of Americans have never seen a Stella painting, says Michael Auping, the Modern’s chief curator and organizer of this exhibition.

It’s time for a Stella update and an eye-opening experience.

What Frank Stella has been doing since his first retrospective in 1970 is spectacular.

The early noise from New York, where this exhibition first opened at the Whitney Museum of American Art in October, alerted the cognoscenti to its importance.

After the Modern’s reservation lines opened for a conversation with Stella on Tuesday night, the free tickets were gone in less than four minutes. The Modern’s phone operators fielded requests for the remainder of the day, apologizing that the tickets were gone, “like it was an Adele concert,” they say.

It has been almost 30 years since the second Stella retrospective was mounted, and Auping thought one was overdue. The Whitney agreed and co-organized the exhibition.

The Stella retrospective was the first solo show to be presented in the Whitney’s new Renzo Piano-designed building in Manhattan. After closing at the Modern, it will travel to the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

Stella’s indelible mark on American modernism happened when he was in his early 30s. He’ll be 80 in May, so there’s 50 years of work out there to see. He’s been working feverishly even though we might not have noticed.

He creates in series, 55 of them to date, each with about 50 works. That puts his output at almost 3,000 pieces, and individual works are often monstrously large — some 40 to 50 feet long.

Some series are huge in numbers as well as scale. The “Moby Dick” series has 135 works, one for each chapter in Herman Melville’s tale. It took 12 years, from 1986 to 1997, to complete, even though one of his sons gave him permission to fall short of painting all 135.

Stella says he finished it out of pure stubbornness.

Six of the “Moby Dick” paintings are in the Modern’s retrospective; they roil around exploding from the wall, layer upon layer, suggesting the waves, water and the whale. They are nothing like the shaped canvases of the 1970s.

What Frank Stella has been doing while we weren’t looking is most definitely worth seeing.

Instant star

Stella moved to New York City in 1958 immediately after graduating from Princeton, and within a year was included in the Museum of Modern Art’s exhibit “Sixteen Americans.”

From this exhibition, one of his black paintings, The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, was bought for the museum’s permanent collection.

The black paintings consisted of bands of black enamel house paint striped across or at right angles on an expanse of raw canvas. The paint was hand-applied, so the bands, separated by narrow white lines, were slightly shaky with fuzzy edges. This rough edge caused the painting to vibrate with a low light and energy.

Stella moved through a variety of off-the-shelf industrial paints because they where cheap (the black enamel he used was 99 cents a gallon), they had a heavy physicality that slippery oil paints lacked, and the way the enamel and subsequent aluminum and copper metallics reflected light was a facet that much more expensive artist oils could not achieve.

These rigidly geometric paintings were the antithesis of the style du jour — abstract expressionism. Stella set out to reduce the expressive aspect of abstraction.

“I wanted to be more abstract,” he says, wanting to see how far he could push abstraction. Liking the hard-edge geometrics of artists Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, Stella aspired to “find a geometry of pure feeling.”

He felt that accentuating the geometry of the canvases did that; it also made up for his self-admitted drawing deficiencies. Soon he was cutting notches in the corners of his canvas and then holes in the center, all the while banding the resultant shapes and the cutouts in his affordable paints.

Initially the perimeter of the shapes was the most remarked-upon facet; later it became apparent that the important element was the role the wall played — it was a partner in abstraction.

The black, copper and aluminum paintings were pivotal for their influence on other artists, says Auping. Stella was moving toward minimalism, and other artists, such as Donald Judd, Carl Andre and Robert Irwin, were edging in a similar direction.

In the exhibition catalog, Robert Irwin recalled Stella’s canvases of the time, saying: “You didn’t know what to make of them as paintings or objects. They just sat there in their gritty inertness and asked to be analyzed against the wall. … Sometimes you looked more at the wall than the painting, which is not necessarily a criticism.”

In 1965, Stella began the irregular polygon series that was followed by the abstract shaped canvases. He was the first artist to use such canvases, says Auping. This is when Stella became internationally recognized.

His canvases — with big, bulbous sides opposed by right angles and images of interlocking protractors painted in flat bands of Day-Glo colors — became the artistic signature for the late 1960s and early ’70s. These became so ubiquitous that they are considered his most significant contribution to post-war painting.

In 1970, he was given his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He was 34 years old, an age when most artists hope to score their first solo show.

“When [Willem] de Kooning and all those guys had their first retrospective, they were much older, but that was specific to that generation. It’s different now,” Auping says.

Almost immediately, Stella’s meteoric career seemed to fizzle. As if he had been accorded too many accolades at too young an age, as if he hadn’t paid his dues, the New York art establishment responsible for according the accolades cooled to Stella.

“There is no question there was blowback,” Auping says.

What’s he done lately?

Stella’s shaped canvases moved into multilayered wall reliefs. Then they became even more three-dimensional; as their parts pushed away from the wall, they needed legs for support.

With each succeeding series, they moved farther from the wall — they had become sculptures. They were colorful and energetic. Minimalism, which was now the school of cool, was neither.

Stella became an outlier. “But he doesn’t care. He doesn’t care what people think,” says Auping.

What he thinks about is volume. It was something de Kooning told him to think about when painting — “Where’s the volume?”

Stella thinks of these three-dimensional works as volumetric paintings. The total or individual pieces are painted, often riotously so, then assembled on an armature. But they often have an umbilical-like connection that extends to the wall. They are paintings that have gestated into the next iteration of painting.

“I have succumbed to sculpture relief painting,” Stella says.

In an interview with Laura Owens recorded in the exhibition catalog, Stella explains his multilayered sculptural paintings: “It’s really about what you do on the surface. That’s the way it was when I started out. It’s pretty much the surface, and eventually in order to have more space, I just added more surfaces to work on. That’s kind of simple-minded, but there you have it.”

He is insistent on emphasizing the painterly qualities of his work. He pauses, and, walking by a behemoth of poured aluminum and steel, Raft of the Medusa (Part 1), says he was making these pieces with found refuse from demolition. But after 9-11, “I lost my taste for it. It had an effect on the way I thought about it.”

Perhaps it was prescient, because it does look like the embodiment of destruction. He runs his hand over the surface and says, “We used molten metal-like paint. See how much it looks like poured paint.”

Another huge work, the 40-foot-long Das Erdbeben in Chili [N#3], from 1999, is a painting of a photographed collage that has been subsequently collaged over. Here, he has worked the topology even when he returns to conventional rectangle of a canvas.

Most recently, Stella has been making the “Scarlatti K” series, lightweight sculptures named for Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757), an Italian Baroque musician who composed more than 500 harpsichord sonatas, and the musicologist who organized the definitive catalog of his work, Ralph Kirkpatrick (1911-1984).

Using Scarlatti’s titles and numbering system, Stella is assured he has titles aplenty for years to come. Surprisingly, these sculptures, although they are quite dimensional, evoke the work of the abstract expressionist painters.

This exhibit was, indeed, sorely overdue. It packs the Modern with a power and energy that is a new high bar for the museum.

For anyone who is not familiar with the man, here is an opportunity to see what all the Stella noise was about, and for the rest of us, a reminder that he never stopped making it.

This story was originally published April 14, 2016 at 1:51 PM with the headline "Frank Stella retrospective sets a new standard for the Modern."