It was made clear by Stella in a 1982 lecture his feelings on abstract art. He explained how he felt that Cubism and abstract painting had eroded and destroyed the dense and active spaces evoked by the human figure in old-master painting.21 The triumphant flattening and dematerializing of pictorial space had been achieved at a price he was no longer willing to pay. Briefly put, Stella was pitying how abstract painting had wiped out the physical energies of expanding and contracting organic volumes earlier conveyed by the illusion that human beings moved and breathed in the spaces of art.

Later regarded as transitional in both style and technique, the Polish Village variations, as a whole, prepared the way for more than a decade of increasingly assertive and often wildly eccentric reliefs that would leap from the wall and occupy enormous portions of the viewer’s space. The Brazilian series (1974-75) was followed by the Exotic Bird series (1976-80), aluminum reliefs whose obtrusive shapes were derived from templates of drafting tools. These two groups and the subsequent Indian Bird series (1977-79) progressively raised the issue of Stella as a sculptor, but he insisted that the wall remained the support, that these works were to be seen from the front, and that the pictorial problems and solutions were concerned with the “fullness” and “mobility” of pictorial space.17 The metal elements that extended from the wall lost any severely planar quality in the presence of abstract, graffiti-like painting that covers and disguises the architecture-like relationships of the surfaces. Stella’s development of an increasingly baroque idiom in the Circuit series (1980-84) and in the South African Mine series (1982) was distinguished by an expanded vocabulary of materials and forms and by extremes of pictorial and actual space.

After his initial “shock and awe” campaign into the modern art world, Stella would pursue his black paintings with a similar second exhibition. In 1960 he held his first one-man show in New York, at the Leo Castelli Gallery, exhibiting striped canvases called the Aluminum Paintings that extended the explorations of The Black Paintings. In these works he introduced notched edges at the perimeters of the canvas which corresponded to the geometric repetitions of the stripe patterns.10 Stella’s paint choice would shift to a tone more achromatic than that of his previous black pictures—the glossy, coldness of aluminum paint. The aluminum stripes and the white streams of bare canvas that separated them moved now in the direction of a still more mechanical evenness and hardness, a persistent goal in Stella’s work. Even more inventive was the shape of the canvas, for it deviated from traditional rectangularity in favor of symmetrically placed notches. This innovation both created and reflected the internal geometries of stripes that now ran only parallel, and not perpendicular, to the edges.11 As Robert Rosenblum noted, “The striped geometries and the picture’s framing edges were inseparable functions of each other; the rectilinear notches of the borders determined the patterns they enclosed and vice versa.”12 Stella would successively work on this theme of striped canvases and metallic paints, producing exhibitions in shiny copper paint as well as a metallic purple sheen. In the previously noted exhibitions, Stella would again push the envelope of 1950s painting by altering the canvases into more unique picture frames. One instance had him producing his flabbergasting stripes on letter-shaped canvases, such as a “T” or a “U” or an “H”. The other exhibition he put on showcased his precious stripes building perimeters around hollowed polygonal shapes, such as a pentagon, decagon, and trapezoid. As a result, Stella drew yet more criticism for his outlandish portrayal of a picture frame. The non-rectangular picture frames he produced work upon were completely unort

Some topics in this essay:
Abstract Expressionism, Jasper Johns’, Frank Stella, Briefly Stella, Picasso Kandinsky, Black Paintings, Robert Rosenblum, Modern Art, Moore Paintings, Irregular Polygons, abstract expressionism, black paintings, frank stella, modern art, museum modern art, art world, museum modern, abstract art, shape canvas, polish village, de kooning, beyond literal presence, existence physical world, artist frank stella, advancing receding colors,