Frank Stella: Minimalist to the Max : THE SHOW : A stunning new exhibit at the County Museum

In 1959, Frank Stella began exhibiting a series of pictures whose sheer simplicity stopped the art world cold. They were nothing more that a set of canvases with black bands nesting concentrically separated by white pinstripes. Utterly detached and rational they nonetheless carried the muffled shock of a perfect poker hand fanned quietly out on the table.

The black pictures posed such basic questions about painting as: How big should it be? What shape? What is the least you can put on it and still have it be a painting? These were issues so elemental they appeared both new and powerful. Grizzled players around the table glanced at each other and tossed in their cards, outflanked by a 23-year-old kid who had studied history at Princeton and wrote his junior year essay on Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts. Stella clamped a smile onto his cigar and scooped up the chips.

He had effectively started a new art movement that would come to be known as Minimalism. It rejected the growing idea that art should return to depicting real things that would become Pop. It rejected the old idea that abstract art must be made in bursts of passion, fueled by existential angst and Old Crow. It posited the idea that art could be made by figuring it out. In one way it was a new classicism, in another it was a new form of corporate academicism.

In a way the rest is history. Stella went on to bigger things, much bigger. He made compositions of V shapes, interlaced circles and protractor curves. Canvases throbbed with the cool glamour of florescent and metal-flake hues and bore exotic lapidary titled like “Star of India.” Compositions grew to the size of white elephants and boxcars and Frank Stella became the painter to be reckoned with. In the ‘60s no artist could pick up brush or spray-gun without dealing with Stella in their minds. He was just so damn smart .

But times change. As the ‘70s progressed there was a growing tendency to feel that Less is Less. Minimalist paintings started to look as pretty and empty as sailboat spinnakers, and by the end of the decade the names of superstars like Jules Olitski and Kenneth Noland began to slip people’s minds. It was over.

Every decade or so there is a day of reckoning for the prevailing art style. The hangers-on slip into tenured obscurity as honorable has-beens while the dons of the movement ascend to Olympus doing excellent impersonations of themselves which Marlborough sells for six figures. It’s a living after all.

Cyclical change is not a disaster, it’s an inevitability that has the virtue of separating the men from the boys. The boys shoot pool and talk about the old days. The men recreate themselves, which is what Frank Stella did.

Beginning around 1970 the art of this most rational of artists slowly came unglued. The results of this aesthetic demolition go on public view today in a traveling survey that will nest at the County Museum of Art until Aug. 14. It is a signal event for a number of reasons including the fact that Southern California has not had a good deep look a Stella’s work for almost 10 years. More persuasive still is the promise that if you just enjoy the sensation of being knocked on your fanny by works of art, this ensemble is virtually guaranteed to do the job.

Oh, there are still some of the old square stripe-style paintings to be seen but they have gone from being archaic tablets of the law to ebullient exercises in magnificent virtuosity. Most are in prismatic colors, but a black and white version tells the story even in its title. Called “Sight Gag,” it first creates a sensation of science fiction deep space where three sides of the squares act as portals and the bottom rung as a shadow. You can practically hear Captain Kirk ordering “Warp Five, Mister Sulu” as you whoosh into hyperspace, but, no sooner are you there than Stella folds the whole thing up like an accordion and you are back in the gallery waiting for the next trick.

Stella continues to work in series. About ten are included in this exhibition. Remarkably varied, they are strung together emotionally by extraordinary Baroque high spirits that contrast markedly with his former deadpan attack. They are almost a sophisticated abstract version of Neo-Expressionism, lacking its morbidity but sharing its leanings to chaos. Conceptually they are marked by Stella’s most noticeable change in thinking. The artist who began with the idea that painting is flat and so should look flat is now interested in all manner of illusionism. That shows itself physically in gigantic scale and physical bulk.

Stella works up small maquettes often using a variety of templates ranging from French curves to others used in the design of boats and railways. More informal shapes are either invented or come from template scraps. His maquettes are enlarged by assistants (at one point he had 24 helpers) and rendered into aluminum, wire mesh and other materials. The artist paints them himself with what appears to be joyous abandon, throwing in jazzy colors and glitter that give the big works a nice slangy twist.

Completed constructions are as aggressive as linebackers, jutting out from the walls in layers sometimes advancing three or four feet into the gallery space. They have such material presence that some observers insist they are relief sculpture even though the artist is adamant that they are paintings.

Fussing about nomenclature doesn’t make much difference but the fact that the artist refuses to deal with them as anything other than paintings may be a bit like a father who insists on thinking of his grown children as little kids--it’s bound to create some problems. The dilemma for viewers of this art is quite simply to figure out where to stand to look at it. Eyeballed dead-on, works tend to read as unusually lumpy paintings. Parts stick out toward you with a remarkable sensation of three-dimensions precisely because they are three-dimensional.

You find yourself wondering what is so hard about making a solid object look solid. As you move to progressively more oblique angles of view the pictorial sensation breaks down. When you are finally looking at the “edge” of the work, so to speak, it is a bit like viewing a play from the wings with all the layers of hanging scenery, ropes, pulleys and sandbags showing. If Stella would admit to himself he has made relief sculpture then he would have to deal with that backstage view, but he won’t so it’s a mess.

The collective impression of these works is almost overwhelmingly impressive and goggling. Stella seems to be able to do absolutely anything he likes with breathtaking bravura. The effect is so grandiose that virtually nothing in modern art comes close to it even though Stella has a fine old time paraphrasing everybody from Picasso to Kandinsky, from Malevich to El Lissitzky. He juggles sensibilities with the deftness of a cat tormenting a ball of yarn. His visual effects make “Phantom of the Opera” look simplistic. He kids Pop art in the “Cones and Pillars” series with its comic-strip columns and if you want a bit of kitsch exotica he evokes Martin Denny’s “Quiet Village” in the “Exotic Bird” series. The epic pretentions of certain kinds of Neo-Expressionism are challenged and surpassed in Stella’s “Wave” series. The artist doesn’t believe in storytelling, but Waves sure looks like Moby Dick to me.

The show creates such a giddy carnival mood you have a very hard time locking on one work at a time to apply the acid test of individual quality. When you finally get focused, a fairly significant percentage of these works don’t entirely come off and the failings are generic. Piece after piece gets garbled into decorative babble or misses the heroic scale intended for it.

William Rubin who organized the exhibition for New York’s Museum of Modern Art and wrote its excellent catalogue essay thinks that Stella’s “Circuit” series is his finest sustained effort. Here it looks like Spanish lace with a bad case of giantism.

The problems of the work are real but none of them swamp either a great series like “Indian Birds” or the general plateau sustained and advanced by the man who has arguably been the world’s leading painter for nearly 30 years.

Funny. Frank Stella is an abstract artist but he is a realist by temperament, believing that, “What you see is what you see.” I think that what he meant by that is that he has always wanted to deal with the fundamental nuts and bolts of picture making. He has stuck so adamantly to that issue that he has been able to grasp the pictorial schematics like no one since the old masters. But which ones?

Stella professes great inspiration from Caravaggio. You can see Caravaggio in Stella’s attempt to shove pictorial space out into the room, but his work isn’t neurotic enough to sustain the comparison. Stella is more like Rubens in his sheer physical hedonism. In his ability to create a Baroque effect out of a rational base he recalls the Poussin of “The Rape of the Sabines.” His delight in theatrical sensation is like the big Cinema-scope Veroneses.

That’s not bad company.