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The Kenneth E. Tyler Collection

Frank Stella: Saving abstraction

a bright screenprint with geometric patterns and shapes collaged together

Frank Stella, Feneralia from the Imaginary places series, 1994–97, National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, gift of Kenneth Tyler 2002

Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator of International prints, discusses Frank Stella's life in the pursuit of a new path for abstraction


11 November 2016
In The Kenneth Tyler Collection
Read time 11 minutes

Artist Frank Stella and master printer Kenneth Tyler played a significant role in the development of twentieth-century American printmaking. Throughout his career, Stella has been a constant adventurer and highwire act, an ‘unstoppable risk-taker’, as collaborator Tyler described him in April this year.

Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, outer suburban Boston. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1958, then moved to New York. ‘I never really wanted to become an artist. But, I did want to make things’, he confessed in a conversation with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Adam D Weinberg on 7 March 2014, and an interest in contemporary events followed. Like many young artists in immediate postwar America, he was initially smitten with artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. Unlike other young artists, though, he achieved almost instant notoriety soon after graduating when, in 1959, he astonished the art world with the sombre, pure forms of his Black paintings, heralding the arrival of minimalism. Stella’s career, however, followed an unexpected trajectory in his search to validate and renew abstraction, finding new imagery that not only embraces shape, space and colour but also, to the surprise of many, decoration.

In a series of lectures at Harvard in the first half of the 1980s, Stella drew parallels between the ‘tepid’ Renaissance of Nicholas Poussin, which necessarily led to Baroque art, and the crisis of postwar abstraction, which he thought also needed to find a new impetus to retain its pre-eminence in the ever-changing world of modern art. The desire to avoid an art style he likened to a ‘slug of lead’, referring to the High Renaissance artist Poussin, and, instead, find a passion to ‘fill the void’, as Caravaggio had done, took Stella on a journey of remarkable invention. In his search for this new path for abstraction, he experimented with highly dramatic and almost narrative forms from the late 1950s onward.

Jane Kinsman, Senior Curator, International prints, drawings and illustrated books

  • Frank Stella

    Star of Persia II
    1967

  • Frank Stella

    Pergusa three, state I
    1983

  • Frank Stella

    Spectralia
    1995

  • Frank Stella

    Dubiaxo
    1996

The survival of abstraction in a viable form was important for Stella, but the divergent extremes of his evolving body of work left many of his early enthusiasts shaking their heads as he travelled from understated geometric forms to a fully blown Baroque style with a suggestive, dramatic expression and an enveloping sense of space. Early on, he had rebelled against the perception that he had been instrumental in introducing a minimalist language, and his career was characterised by a reaction against this unwanted mantle of purity.

Yet, there is consistency in Stella’s work. An underlying ‘spring-loaded’ tension and dynamism has always characterised it, from the early Black paintings of his youth to the more off-the-wall extravaganzas of recent years. His art chronicles a lifetime of experimenting with abstraction, and it is this narrative that was the underlying current of his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2015.

But some critics still considered his later contributions a total lapse of taste. Ben Davis, in his review for artnet on 3 November 2015, agreed with critics who ‘don’t much like the swollen theatrics of Stella’s late works’. These ‘late monsters’, for Davis, took up far too much space, were too adventurous and far too dramatic, although he also conceded that the casual art viewer might well find them more to their liking. Jason Farago, on the other hand, recognises Stella as an artist who continues to explore new ideas, untrammelled by his earlier success. In his review in the Guardian of 29 October 2015, he writes that it is Stella’s ‘boundless and commendable evolution, rather than some static mastery, that is the mark of Stella’s seriousness’.

The criticism that Stella should have moved to parlour-sized works in a more conventional form failed to appreciate the bravura of an artist still intent on seeking new ways to give life to the art of abstraction. It’s this exploration that the Frank Stella: The Kenneth Tyler print collection exhibition will present for audiences to discover.

Extract from Artonview no 87 | Spring 2016, the NGA’s quarterly magazine. To subscribe, become a gallery member.

Frank Stella: The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection was on display from 19 November 2016—22 October 2017

To learn more visit the Kenneth E. Tyler Collection website or Frank Stella's artist page.


Related


Exhibition

Hockney Masterworks in Paint / Stella & Tyler Masterworks in Print

Past Exhibition

14 Oct 1999—26 Jan 2000

The Kenneth E. Tyler Collection

Backwards intaglio: making Frank Stella’s ‘Swan Engravings’

Black and white photo of Frank Stella and Kenneth Tyler on the ground assembling magnesium plates for ‘Swan engraving IV’

Tyler Graphics printer Rodney Konopaki discusses the process of using 17,000 Q-tips to help create Frank Stella's Swan engravings.

Read Time 17 minutes
Video

Frank Stella on 'The Fountain'

A video still of a man speaking

Published 25 August 2011

The Kenneth E. Tyler Collection

Frank Stella exhibition coming soon!

Exhibition poster for Frank Stella: The Kenneth Tyler Collection

Frank Stella: The Kenneth Tyler Collection was an exhibition featuring over 1,000 prints, proofs and matrices by Stella, as well as archival materials

Read Time 4 minutes

Frank Stella

Black and white photograph of Frank Stella

One of 77 artists who collaborated with master printer Kenneth Tyler.

The Kenneth E. Tyler Collection

Technique in Focus: Frank Stella’s ‘Circuits’ series

Frank Stella views ‘Mosport’ from his ‘Circuits’ series of relief paintings (in progress) on the wall of his studio

The Kenneth Tyler Collection team take an in depth look at the techniques and materials used by Frank Stella to produce his ‘Circuits’ series.

Read Time 9 minutes

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