Fig. 13 Frank Stella, Valparaiso Flesh and Green, 1963. Metallic paint on canvas, 6 ft. 6 in. x 11 ft. 3 in. x 3 in. (2 x 3.4 x .1 m). Private collection
13
renderings of the whimsical, but blunt, “Had Gadya” text/song: “One little goat, one little goat . . . Then came a cat and ate the goat . . . Then came a dog and bit the cat that ate the goat . . . Then came a stick and beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat . . . Then came fire and burnt the stick that beat the dog that bit the cat that ate the goat,” and so on. The various components of the narrative have been interpreted as alluding to people and events in Jewish history, which is a grand series of destructions and re-creations. Stella saw it as analogous to the creative process. While his early Minimalist works were schemat ically planned out through drawings and sketches, Stella’s method has evolved toward a process of manipulating many materials—making a form, tearing it up, and then using the destructions to create new forms. The “Had Gadya” story reminded him not only of his own approach to art making, but of Johns’s well-known description of the creative process: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.”37 In his handling of the story, Stella also took note of how Lissitzky’s figures seem suspended in the space of the prints, similar to the figures of Lissitzky’s friend and fellow painter Marc Chagall. In Stella’s “Had Gadya” lithographs, illusionistic space and literal forms con tinually swallow each other up. This interactive drama is expanded and made brazenly physical in the related Cones and Pillars series (1984–87), which takes the form of large-scale, high- relief paintings. Here, Stella invents his own narrative of abstract protagonists and threats—what the artist has called “a battle of forms fighting for position in the paintings.” Besides Cézanne, the main characters of these paintings—the cones and pillars—were inspired
33 Phenomenology of Frank
by a late nineteenth-century diagrammatic drawing in an architectural treatise on classical stone cutting. Stella has transformed the classicism of these forms into an almost cartoon-like brawl as they bore deep illusionistic spaces into the wall or tumble out from it as flying objects. Made of lightweight aluminum, they are suspended in real space in front of the painting, as if animated by an invisible force. William Rubin compared the Cones and Pillars to Fernand Léger’s Mechanical Elements series (1918–23; fig. 11), while Rosenblum imagined them as akin to a freeze-frame of a cartoon explosion.38 In fact, they are a rigorously physical manifestation of both. Though Stella has never mentioned it, given his knowledge of early twentiethcentury Russian abstraction, it is also possible to see his Cones and Pillars series as a pictorial allusion to Tatlin’s famous model for the Monument to the Third International (1920), in which an open metal and spiraling framework held a glass cylinder, a glass cone, and a glass cube—the entire semivertical structure leaning on a dynamic, asymmetrical axis. To underscore his interest in simple but strong narratives, Stella titled the Cones and Pillars after a cycle of Italian folktales selected and retold by Italo Calvino in 1956. The poet recast the stories with the idea of making them more accessible to general readers. The difference between Calvino’s tales and the originals is that his telling is very basic and less elaborate, just as Stella’s Cones and Pillars paintings are inhabited by simple, geometric, abstract forms. Since these paintings were named subsequent to their creation, the connections they each have to a given story are likewise very basic. Stella describes the correlation as follows: “They are simple and direct, the way a fairy tale is. They are