Minimal Cartwheels

When Frank Stella's first canvases, consisting of black pin-stripe squares inside of squares, were shown at Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art in 1960, local papers reacted in horror. "Unspeakably boring!" snapped Herald Tribune Critic Emily Genauer. A less determined man might have gone into life insurance--but Stella painted on. His latest canvases, on view at the Castelli Gallery, are newly brilliant with a rainbow of Day-Glo colors, but they are as elemental in concept as ever (see color opposite). What has changed is that instead of being banned for boredom, Stella at the age of 31 is being heralded as one of the most influential artists in New York City, and has had his outsized canvases shown in scores of important museums and international exhibitions.

As the creator seven years ago of the first shaped geometric canvases, Stella is looked up to by dozens of other young artists as a precursor of the whole minimal school of painting and sculpture. His new works demonstrate how far removed trend-setting art has become from any concern with society, reality, human interest or popular taste: the multicolored cartwheels, half-moons and pie cuts look as though they had been stamped out on a machine. They were, in fact, designed with the aid of a protractor and compass, although unlike many minimal sculptors, Stella still believes in executing his works by hand. The paintings were named (Sabra, Sinjerli) for ancient cities in Asia Minor only because Stella has been looking at plans for circular cities in a book on Islamic architecture.

Locking Form and Content. "Whatever interest I have in people," says Stella, "I have in daily contact with them. I don't want them walking around in my paintings." The son of a Massachusetts doctor, Stella studied at Andover's Phillips Academy under Abstractionist Painter Patrick Morgan, was drawing geometric blocks of color while other students were still sketching nudes and horses. Upon graduation from Princeton in 1958 with an A.B. in history, he moved to Manhattan.

Stella's work attracted attention almost immediately because it took abstraction one measurable step farther along the path toward pure form. The generation of Pollock and Kline had eliminated the figure; their canvases derived impact and emotion from the visible signs of struggle left by the painter's drips, splashes and violent brush marks. The "color field" painters of the 1950s, led by the late Morris Louis, eliminated the mark of the painter's hand, but their veils of color floating within the rectangle of a canvas aimed at evoking a haunting, lyric sense of other-worldly beauty. A Stella painting, on the other hand, locks form and content together, forcing the viewer to accept it as an object unique unto itself. To viewers who find the result boring or merely decorative, the artist replies, "My eyes and my emotions tell me something different. They tell me it's very beautiful, complicated, moving, disturbing and challenging. There are forces at work to think about here."

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