An installation view of “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings,” at L&M Arts through June 2.
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: April 26, 2012
The handsome show of Frank Stella’s early paintings at L&M Artscould not be better timed. Abstract art, especially of a Minimalist mien, is on the uptick right now, with a few too many young artists acting as if they have invented the wheel, especially where brushy or severely simplified monochromes are concerned.
Perhaps this is to be expected. Art is not a science; it does not proceed in a neat, linear progression. Artists often circle back, picking up ideas that their predecessors left undeveloped and trying to push them further. Still, a blast from the past never hurts: the artistic present can never know too much about what has come before.
The rare museum-quality exhibition that is “Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” is just that kind of blast. It features 13 of the adamant, quietly pulsing, exceedingly frontal paintings that Mr. Stella made in New York in the three and a half years after he arrived here in the summer of 1958, fresh out of Princeton.
This amounts to more early Stellas than have been exhibited in New York since the survey of his work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970. They provide a heady sense of the first few fastest-moving years of his development, when he helped bring the Abstract Expressionist chapter of New York School painting to a close and lay the foundation for Minimalism.
On view are examples of the Black Paintings series, with which he announced himself to the New York art world in the Museum of Modern Art’s 1959 “Sixteen Americans” exhibition, as well as works from his Aluminum and Copper series, unveiled in his first and second solo shows at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960 and 1962. All the paintings feature repeating bands or stripes of a single color applied to canvases that start out rectangular and end up emphatically shaped, resembling big letters. Also included is “Delta,” a wonderfully shaggy, black-over-dark-red predecessor of these more classic stripe paintings.
These works represent the cornerstone of Mr. Stella’s reputation, the Stellas whose historical importance, as with Picasso’s Cubist paintings, is most widely, if somewhat predictably, accepted. And just as the decimated forms of Cubism introduce an integration between image and surface, the Stellas here progressively articulate a new agreement between painting as image and as object. They hark back to a time when flatness was abstract painting’s primary goal, and the physical facts of the medium were starting to be endlessly parsed — beginning with shaped canvases — in a process that continues today. No artist’s work embodied these pursuits as rigorously as Mr. Stella’s; in the paintings at L&M he laid down the tracks that others followed.
But in this show you also see a young painter edging his way, with some setbacks, toward his first mature statements, making progress that is at times as much physical and technical as anything else. The unevenness and general handmade roughness of the Black Paintings is especially striking. Greatly influenced by Jasper Johns’s flag paintings, Mr. Stella sought an even more rigorous logic between physical and visual by using parallel bands of black that either reiterate or run diagonally to the edges of the canvas.
But the Frank Stella of the Black Paintings was not yet the Frank Stella who famously said, in 1966, “What you see is what you see” — the epitome of a literal, nothing-but-the-facts approach to the medium. Beyond their apparent logic, these early works are also broodingly Romantic, their mood underscored by titles that flirt with darkness, chaos and otherness.
“Bethlehem’s Hospital” takes it name from the London mental institution sometimes known as Bedlam. “Die Fahne hoch!” (“The Flag on High”) echoes a phrase from a Nazi marching song. The most famous title is “Arbeit Macht Frei” (“Work Makes You Free”), the words that were splayed demonically above the gates to Auschwitz and other concentration camps.
Some of the Black Paintings are much stronger than others, with “Bethlehem’s Hospital” and “Arbeit Macht Frei” being especially murky. Their stripes, painted over black washes, are sometimes barely discernible; in certain areas they seem all but monochromatic, which gives them a youthful awkwardness and a reliclike, not-quite-alive aspect.
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“Frank Stella: Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings” runs through June 2 at L&M Arts, 45 East 78th Street, Manhattan; (212) 861-0020, lmgallery.com.