Word: abstractable
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...American artists to get this double crown in their lifetime, thanks to the enthusiasm with which William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, views his work. It is hardly an exaggeration that MOMA treats Stella as Jackson Pollock's true dauphin in the lineage of American abstract painting...
...that good? Not quite, but to fall short of such a comparison is still to achieve something. Stella is a pictorial rhetorician on the grand scale, and nobody who cares about the fate of abstract painting today could chew through this show -- cramped and arrhythmic though its installation is -- without being deeply moved. Just as Lucian Freud's exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington shows up the dinginess of most American figure painting in the '80s, so Stella's fearless panache and the profusion of his output refute the common idea that the possibilities of abstract painting are played...
Nobody who saw them in the early '60s can forget the impact of Stella's first "minimalist" works, the black-stripe paintings, done when he was in his 20s and just out of Princeton. One is apt to think of abstract artists' careers beginning in complexity and ending in reduction with the wisdom of age, like Mondrian's. Stella, so far, has inverted this: he started out polemical and bare, but has complicated his art to the point of apoplexy. Episode II, in which our hero goes nuts in the tropics, battles with spotted fluorescent snakes but does find...
...Stella was convinced that abstract painting, for its own survival, would have to take practical lessons from old masters like Rubens and Caravaggio; it must find an "independent pictorial space to establish its ties with the everyday space of perceived reality." This ran counter to the whole argument of American formalism -- and of the movement with which his early black, aluminum and copper stripes had been associated, minimalism -- which strove to isolate the space of pictures from that of the real world. The results were a set of brilliantly colored oblique reliefs, the Brazilian paintings of 1974-75, followed...
...lies not far below the gesticular surface of his work after 1975. Nevertheless he was putting himself at some risk. His new paintings, as they got loopier and more & baroque, looked like a critique of the high cool and decorous lyricism that had become the twin poles of American abstraction. "Somehow painting today," he would write later, "especially abstract painting, cannot bring itself to declare what Caravaggio and Rubens demonstrated again and again -- that picture building is everything...