Frank Stella: Minimalist to the Max : THE ARTIST : He has enjoyed Fail-Safe career

Frank Stella certainly doesn’t look like the leading international Classical Baroque master of abstract art. At 53 he is fit if a trifle paunchy. Installing his show in the galleries of the County Museum of Art, he blends in with the crew wearing gray chinos, gray T-shirt and black Reeboks. They match his short, grizzled hair, but neither his tan complexion nor his huge colorful works. Woody Allen could play the part of the painter if you toned the actor down a bit.

Stella consults with museum director Earl (Rusty) Powell, who looks resplendently dignified in a dark suit. They appear involved in a matter of great import. Maybe something about changes Stella is making in the hanging. The 40 or so works look airy but range up to a ton in weight and some are cantilevered from false walls so switching them around is no easy matter. As it turns out, the two men are just making a date to play squash later in the afternoon.

There is something of the athletic realist about the painter. He used to go to a lot of Formula One races in Europe, and he still breeds racehorses as a hobby although he doesn’t much like to talk about it. “My biggest nightmare is that someday I’ll breed a winner. Imagine having a horse that’s more famous than you are.” He has the slightly incredulous twang and staccato delivery of a real New Yorker. He used to have a reputation as a somewhat thorny character. These days he is relaxed and affable even in the midst of an installation.

As painters go, there are very few who equal the stature and reknown of Frank Stella. For nearly 30 years he has held center stage in the art world. He started successful in the ‘60s and instead of fizzling out with the demise of Minimalist abstraction, he got a huge second wind in his series of glitzy Baroque template paintings.

“For a long time I resisted being an artist. In the social milieu where I grew up, there was something demeaning about it. My parents’ view was that artists were possibly a little better than pimps. They thought art had to do with the past. Michelangelo could be a great artist, but there was no sense in being an artist in the present.”

Stella was born in a suburb of Boston. His father was a gynecologist, his mother had gone to art school. He attended Andover and Princeton. When he came on the art scene, such tony university credentials were virtually unheard of. He represented a new breed of intellectually sophisticated artist. He married the art critic Barbara Rose. Another critic, Michael Fried, served as best man. His early work was intensely rational and seemingly designed to fuel critical dialogue. The work was tight. Today everybody wants to know how he made the transition to his loose manner.

Some observers think it came from a happy second marriage to Helen McGurk and the birth of two sons whom the artist enjoys enormously. But he doesn’t much like such psychological interpretations.

“I taught myself to paint doing the stripe paintings. I saw them as somehow parallel to other painting but not really painting. Somehow I needed to isolate myself. I wanted to be separate from it. Maybe something in my temperament.

“Doing the stripe paintings gave me the freedom and courage I needed before I could loosen up and join the mainstream.”

Stella has the reputation as one of the most influential figures of his day. One sees his shadow constantly in the works of other artists both obscure and famous. Just outside the galleries housing his retrospective there is a colored sculpture by Nancy Graves, which bears a family resemblance to his art.

“Sure, I’m aware of influence, but it cuts both ways. How could you look at what I’m doing now and not think of what John Chamberlain has been doing for years? I just got to it later.

“I think the ‘60s were a good period. There was an extraordinary level of energy both in the degree of talent and in the numbers of artists. Think about all those good people from Ellsworth Kelly to Jack Youngerman and Pop people like James Rosenquist. I’ll give you nine to five there will be an Olitski revival in a few years. Anthony Caro is an extraordinary talent.”

But if they are still so good, why is he the one universally seen as the unfaltering winner, the artist with the fail-safe career?

“Maybe I just have a talent for shooting my mouth off. You know the public is lazy. If they see the same thing long enough, they accept it and fall asleep. Change wakes them up.

But he didn’t change, he says, for the public. In his view the changes that evolved in the studio were gradual and logical rather than dramatic. It is striking that late stripe paintings and the Baroque works in the galleries are so clearly the creation of the same man.

“Painters paint to keep themselves interested,” Stella shrugs.

The retrospective has been traveling since 1987, LACMA being its final stop. Stella traveled to all six venues, including stops in Paris and Amsterdam. He notices the work seems to change in each location.

“Some pieces get tired on the road, others seem to like to travel. You know this is sort of trivial, but there are pieces here that seem to be finished and others that stay alive. They all come back to the studio between shows and we work on some of them. Those two (Wave Series) pieces over there were almost completely repainted after the Berlin show.”

He paces the galleries constantly as he talks to a visitor. Critics have raised questions about the genre of the works. Are they paintings or relief sculptures? Stella says he has been grappling with that, “learning” from the works. He points out how he has progressively resolved the problems that arise from having works jut so far out from the walls that they have several angles of view.

“I think it’s getting pretty well solved. When you study your own work, it’s the ideas in them that turn out to be useful. You try to combine the best of what you’ve done before and come up with something that really has it all.”

“I’m haunted by this fear that in the end what you make is only an object, only a decorative thing. I try to infuse the work with real life, but you never know.”

Stella is noted as an obdurate defender of abstract art and of modernism, which seem to be pretty much the same thing to him--the legitimate extension of the history of all art.

“I don’t want to talk a bunch of baloney here, but painting is not a base activity. Painting is a high calling and what you do should contribute to the life of the overall thing.

“Maybe an artist like Lucien Freud is saying something interesting at some level, but I don’t think it’s anything I should have to worry about. Balthus is an even better example. He’s almost prurient. I guess I find that kind of art too eccentric, too individual.

“The artist has a funny relation to history. He is history but he has to be it and do it at the same time. That requires some distance and some integrity.”