The prince of whales
Why has the father of
minimalism devoted 15 years of his life to
Moby Dick? Frank Stella
explains all to Jonathan Jones
Thursday April 5, 2001
The Guardian
Frank Stella decides he wants
to be interviewed behind the huge desk of his
London dealer. "I'm head of the
corporation," he jokes. He's wearing a fleece
with Team Stella emblazoned on
it. A few minutes later a former director of
the Tate Gallery pops in to say
hello. Whatever Stella does now, even if he
goes senile and starts
exhibiting doodles, he will be remembered as a great
American artist. He has known
this since he was in his early 20s.
Stella was born in 1936, grew
up in a suburb of Boston, and was just out of
Princeton when he produced his
so-called Black Paintings. With such
grimly evocative titles as Die
Fahne Hoch! (The Banner High), named after a
Nazi marching song, and The
Marriage of Reason and Squalor, Stella's first
paintings are shocking. Each
consists of a layering of black rectangular
stripes, fanning out like the
citadels of some lost Assyrian city, taking their
shape from the canvas itself.
They have been interpreted as both an attack on
the high modernist art of the
abstract expressionist artists who came before
him - Pollock, Rothko and
Newman - and the continuation of their
achievement. He has been
acclaimed as both the founder of minimalism and
the last artist to stand
against it.
Either way, Stella's debut was
a sensation. His Black Paintings were shown
at the Museum of Modern Art in
New York in 1960 in an exhibition that also
showcased Jasper Johns and
Robert Rauschenberg. But the 24-year old
Stella stood out. The paintings
were bought by the museum, and are now
displayed alongside such
masterpieces as Johns's Flag, Pollock's One and
Matisse's Piano Lesson.
Stella was a prodigy, a figure
of exceptional glamour, the champ,
characterised as a genius while
still at Princeton. Genius is a big word, but
before he left university,
Stella was accustomed to people applying it to him
and the praise in the 1960s
only got more elevated.
But what does a genius do next?
Frank Stella is in London to
promote a book, Frank Stella's Moby Dick by
Robert K Wallace. It chronicles
and analyses the series that Stella himself
sees as central to his later
career - artworks made during the 1980s and
1990s, including lithographs,
sculptures and installations, each of which
takes its title from one of the
135 chapters of Herman Melville's great
American novel. "Why couldn't
there be a British Melville?" wonders Stella.
"They had great explorers, but,
I don't know, a quest for God or chasing the
white whale is different from a
quest for empire, right? The British want to
really own it somehow; the
Americans just want to be able to grasp it.
Maybe they're slightly less
materialistic - it's hard to believe."
Indeed it is. But American art
such as Stella's is less materialistic, pushing
for abstraction while British
art remains defiantly earthbound. Stella's
spiritual apprehension of the
visual world may be linked to his origins in
puritan Boston (not that far
from Nantucket from where the Pequod sets sail
in Moby Dick).
It occurs to you, seeing him
behind that big desk and listening to his dryly
humorous voice telling his
tale, that Stella himself would make a character
in a great American novel. He's
a modern Queequeg - the supremely talented
harpoonist in Moby Dick, who,
when asked for his credentials, throws his
harpoon at a tiny blob of tar
on a roof, hitting the target dead centre. If that
was a whale's eye, he says, the
whale would be dead now. Stella once told his
friend Michael Fried, the
critic and art historian, that his own idea of genius
was the baseball player Ted
Williams, because he could see the ball
perfectly and then hit it right
out of the park.
Stella became a revered
American artist when he was in his early 20s, but
he didn't rest on his laurels
and he didn't make more and more brutal
paintings. Instead he tried to
stage that elusive second act. He began to make
his paintings more complex in
structure, colour and shape, and then brought
them off the wall, welding,
shaping, doing what a sculptor does, but still -
in fact more recognisably than
with the Black Paintings - seeing as a
painter.
Critics have been, to say the
least, divided about what happened to the art of
Frank Stella. Right now, art is
in a swing back to the minimalist objective
art of the 1960s; artists are
acclaimed for their starkness, and Stella's
early work looks modern in a
way that his later work does not. Young artists
are transfixed and influenced
by Die Fahne Hoch! or Six Mile Bottom
(1960), with its silvery
authority, in a way they are not by 138 attractive
but inessential works
responding to Moby Dick. But then, as Stella says,
when he started out, some
critic described his stripe paintings as "boring".
"People say I jump around a
lot, but it seems to me like I spend plenty of
time on everything I work on. I
can't say I left many stones unturned. But
things do wear out for me."
If Stella's career were a great
American novel, the most important
supporting character would be
Fried. It's not just that they went to
Princeton together and both
became towering figures in the nation's cultural
establishment (Fried has become
one of America's most lauded academics)
but that Fried's and Stella's
ideas are intertwined. At one point, Stella
criticises the art of his
contemporary, the minimalist Donald Judd, as
"literalist". It's one of
Fried's favourite words.
Fried loathed the minimalists -
Donald Judd, Robert Morris, Carl Andre -
artists who emerged in New York
in the 1960s, wanting to do something
different from the generation
of Pollock and Rothko, and who simply
presented "objects" to the
viewer, brutally shorn of traditional aesthetic
values. In a famous 1967
article in the New York magazine Artforum, Fried
denounced minimalism as
"theatrical" - claiming that it made cheap claims
on people's attention - and
"literal" - ie misunderstanding the nature of art
as illusion. Modern art, he
argued, was the opposite of this - a repudiation
of theatre, false values, and
the merely objective; ultimately, a spiritually
uplifting art. It's a debate
that still matters because minimalism is the
underpinning of art today. All
those vitrines and casts, the shark and the
house.
But what did Fried have to say
about his friend Stella? For many, Stella's
early paintings were the
founding statements of minimalism. Fried argued,
however, that as Stella
developed, he was making it more and more plain
that he was a painterly
painter, who believed in art, and that his works,
with their increasing richness,
were deliberate corrections of the
minimalist mistake. Yet, in his
youth, Stella said some tough and undeniably
minimalist things about art. He
said that in his paintings, "What you see is
what you see". He said, "I
tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can."
Today he says that he never
wanted to destroy anyone's idea of a well-made
painting. The Black Paintings
are, "quite painterly - although they're one
colour, they seem to me to be
closer to Rothko than just about anything else.
The idea that these were such a
rejection of abstract expressionism I don't
think is accurate." Stella
describes his Moby Dick series as a kind of tribute
to those Captain Ahabs, the
abstract expressionists. "They're still the
generation I admire. This is
paying my debt, or not so much paying my debt
as expressing my admiration for
the abstract expressionist generation that I
grew up with and that I admired
the most, and that I still admire."
Moby Dick, Ahab's doomed
pursuit of the mystical image of the great white
whale, was a touchstone for the
abstract expressionist painters. Jackson
Pollock named at least one
painting after the novel and intended to give its
name to his classic early work
Pasiphae, then switched to something from
Greek myth because his patron
Peggy Guggenheim didn't like the Melville
reference. Pollock's sense of
space is absolutely suggested by Melville, and
the rolling, wild wave forms of
Stella's Moby Dick - inspired by observing
beluga whales swimming in the
New York aquarium - are very Pollock.
In the Moby Dick series, Stella
sees himself challenging the deepest
assumptions of modern art with
a new understanding of what abstraction can
do: "Abstraction in the 20th
century is dependent on cubism, which is
arranging planes in space, but
the planes are arranged in a kind of stiff and
geometric kind of way. Once the
planes begin to bend and curve and deform
then you get into what happens
in Moby Dick - it's a way of opening things
up for abstraction."
Stella certainly has more in
common with the American painters of
Pollock's generation than he
does with the ironising, theatrical minimalists
who thought he was on their
side. But he has ended up cast adrift in an open
boat, an American individualist
making his own eccentric way, as the
watchers from the shore try and
fail to categorise him - a minimalist, a
modernist, a postmodernist.
This makes the novel in which he is a
character, the champ, the
American genius, a troubling read. Frank Stella
has never done anything that
lived up to his early work. But who has?
Patricia wrote:
> http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/story/0,3604,468640,00.html
