ical experience for the viewer. The trajectory of an artist’s career does not often take the form of an arc, but, rather, a meandering, circuitous path marked by differing objects that make up a family. As in all families, some bear a close resemblance, while others appear as outliers. What ties them together, their visual DNA, as it were, is not a look or style, but a particular way of seeing. In Stella’s case, it is about seeing literal space through and around materiality. The irony is that those of us who have always viewed him as a “Minimalist” may have misunderstood the narrative his early works put in place. — 1. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from the author’s interviews with Frank Stella conducted between October 1, 2009, and August 2014 at the artist’s homes and studio. 2. Frank Stella, “The Pratt Lecture,” New York, winter 1960; the lecture is reprinted in the present volume. 3. Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography (New York: Rizzoli, 1995), 14. 4. For a comprehensive discussion of the Black Paintings, see Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1976). 5. Walter Darby Bannard, in a telephone conversation with the author, June 16, 2014. 6. Lawrence Alloway, in a series of interviews with the author by telephone and in New York, June 1986–September 1988. The interviews were conducted in preparation for two major exhibitions at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, and their accompanying publications: Abstract Expressionism: The Critical Developments, 1987, and Abstraction, Geometry, Painting: Selected Geometric Abstract Painting in America since 1945, 1989. 7. Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 8 (1965): 94. 8. Robert Irwin, in telephone conversations with the author between January 27 and February 15, 2010. 9. Frank Stella with Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, “New Nihilism or New Art?,” radio interview by Bruce Glaser, WBAI-FM (New York), broadcast March 24, 1964. Transcript published in “Questions to Stella and Judd,” ed. Lucy R. Lippard, Artnews 65, no. 5 (September 1966): 55–61. 10. Clement Greenberg, Post-Painterly Abstraction (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1964). The catalogue accompanied an exhibition curated by Greenberg that included three works by Stella from the Aluminum and Purple series. 11. Robert Morris, “Notes on Sculpture, Part I,” Artforum 4, no. 6 (February 1966): 42–44; “Notes on Sculpture, Part II,” Artforum 5, no. 2 (October 1966): 20–23. 12. Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (June 1967): 15. 13. Frank Stella, “Grimm’s Ecstasy” (1991), in Bonnie Clearwater, Frank Stella at Two Thousand: Changing the Rules (North Miami: Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami, 2000), 68. 14. The Purple Painting titles refer to Carl Andre, Leo Castelli, Emile de Antonio (“D”), Hollis Frampton, Henry Geldzahler (“Garden”), Sidney Guberman, Ileana Sonnabend, and Charlotte Tokayer. Guberman, Frank Stella, 75. 15. Brian O’Doherty, “Frank Stella and a Crisis of Nothingness,” New York Times, January 19, 1964. 16. Sol LeWitt, in an interview with the author, Fort Worth, October 12, 1994. 17. Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), 36. 18. Stella, “New Nihilism or New Art?” 19. Ad Reinhardt, quoted in Margit Rowell, “Ad Reinhardt: Style as Recurrence,” in Ad Reinhardt and Color (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1980), 23. 20. El Lissitzky, “The Film of El’s Life” (1928), in El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts, ed. Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1967), 325.
39 Phenomenology of Frank
21. William Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1987), 8. 22. John Baldessari, in a telephone conversation with the author, May 2011. 23. Lawrence Weiner, in an interview with the author, Fort Worth, October 12, 2010. 24. For an in-depth discussion of Stella’s relationship to the decorative, see Markus Brüderlin, “Frank Stella and Ornament,” in Frank Stella: The Retrospective; Works, 1958–2012 (Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2012), 98–125. 25. Frank Stella, quoted in William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 149. 26. Frank Stella, “Art in Western Christendom,” an essay submitted to the Department of History, Princeton University, in partial fulfillment of the degree of bachelor of arts, 1958. 27. Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), 51. 28. Camilla Gray, The Great Experiment: Russian Art, 1863–1922 (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986), 180. 29. Henri Matisse, Jazz (Paris, 1947), 73–74, trans. in Jack Flam, Matisse on Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995), 172. 30. Frank Gehry, in conversation with the author, Dallas, January 16, 1999. 31. Frank Stella, “Frank Stella Talks about His Recent Work,” interview by Juliet Steyn, Art Monthly 7 (May 1977): 13. 32. The Artforum questionnaire was written by Robert Pincus-Witten. Responses from painters were published in “Painter’s Reply . . . ,” Artforum 14, no. 1 (September 1975): 26–36. 33. During the 1980s, the collector and art dealer Holly Solomon championed the Pattern and Decoration movement, which freely mixed decorative patterns (found and invented) with expressionistic gesture, using a wide range of disparate materials. Solomon often pointed to Stella’s Exotic and Indian Birds series as leading the way for the younger generation of artists that she represented. In fact, she took the author to attend one of Stella’s Harvard lectures. 34. Julian Schnabel, in conversation with the author, Fort Worth, November 6, 2014. 35. Frank Stella, in Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987, 77. 36. Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet’s Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton (London: Thames & Hudson, 1991), 163–64. 37. Jasper Johns, “Sketchbook Notes,” Art and Literature 4 (Spring 1965): 192. 38. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970–1987, 144; Robert Rosenblum, letter to the author, April 19, 1987. 39. For a chart listing the correlations between the various groups of the series and the individual chapters of the novel, see Robert K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes (New York: Blue Heron Press, 2006), 39. 40. Philip Leider, “Shakespearean Fish,” Art in America 78, no. 2 (October 1990): 172–91. 41. Christian Geelhaar, Frank Stella: Working Drawings/Zeichnungen, 1956–1970 (Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1980), 84. 42. Kazimir Malevich, The Non-Objective World: The Manifesto of Suprematism (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2003), 67. 43. Robert Hobbs, “Frank Stella: Matrixed and Real Space,” Frank Stella: Recent Work (Philadelphia: Locks Gallery, 2000), 10.