Antique

Over a decades-long career, Frank Stella has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art. (Pictured here: Empress of India, 1965.)

Frank Stella does huge work — some of it 20 feet tall and twice as long — so he has a suitably supersized studio about an hour's drive north of New York City. With hundreds of artworks and tables strewn with ideas in progress, the studio is a museum in itself.

"This is a piece from 1970, that's a piece I guess from the '80s," Stella says, "and this is a very recent piece from about a year ago." He points to one of several free-standing organic forms — a matte black sculpture that looks kind of like the small, dried seedpods he has nearby, but not. It's different from anything he's done before.



Frank Stella, Eskimo Curlew, 1976.

Stella is one of the most influential and respected artists of the 20th century, and at nearly 80 years old he's still pushing the possibilities of his art. Over a six-decade-long career, he has done sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, brightly-colored geometric shapes and mostly black paintings that literally changed the way people looked at art in the late 1950s. All that and more is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art's traveling retrospective of Stella's work, curated in partnership with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth.

"The integrity of being an artist for Frank means going into the unknown," says Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney and co-curator of the retrospective. He says, "A great artist is somebody who's not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He's done it probably a dozen times or more."

Stella has pretty much always painted, whether it was helping his father paint the house or his mother decorate clamshells at home in Massachusetts. "I'm more of a house painter," he says. "That's the way I work."



Frank Stella, Chocorua IV, 1966.

Stella started painting seriously in high school, and even then he was ambitious. "I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do," he says. "And, you know, I couldn't forget [Wassily] Kandinsky and [Kazimir] Malevich and [Piet] Mondrian, I mean that was the basis. You know, and you couldn't forget [Pablo] Picasso, [Henri] Matisse and [Joan] Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better."

But Stella didn't want to be like any of them. His goal was to not depict anything, something he notoriously achieved in 1958 with his black paintings. Co-curator Adam Weinberg says they changed everything.

"It's basically one color of paint," he says. "You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it's not a window into something — you're not looking at a landscape, you're not looking at a portrait, but you're looking at a painting. It's basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it's what he said famously: What you see is what you see."

Though, in this case, it took Stella some time to see it. He'd done a painting with red stripes (minimalist, geometric) and wasn't entirely happy, so he painted it over all black before he went to bed. In the morning, he considered what he'd done.

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