Word: stella
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...Frank Stella's graphics take on the size and power of paintings...
...American art world is full of young prodigies these days, none of them quite as convincing as its formerly young one, Frank Stella. It was in 1970 that Stella, at 33, became the youngest painter ever to be given a retrospective by New York City's Museum of Modern Art. To survive the envy and the scrutiny it brought, one needed the balance of a downhill racer, the skin of an alligator and the irony of Groucho Marx. Stella had all of these things...
...paintings" of 1958-60, symmetrical arrays of black stripes on a white ground. Though he had an unshakable faith in the idea that abstract painting was the mainstream of modern art, he kept on the move. Well before the prestige of minimalism as a historic style began to ebb, Stella was recomplicating his paintings, leading them with a dazzling display of neon, pearly and metallic colors, scribbling over the once sober surfaces with oil stick and grease pencil, and replacing their geometrical symmetries with fantastically wreathing curlicues, squiggles and French curves. It was as though the main theme...
This was also true of his prints. In the past few years Stella has emerged as one of the leading American peintre-graveurs-artists whose printmaking is an integral part of their work, not merely a pendant to it. A retrospective of Stella's prints, accompanied by a full catalogue by Art Historian Richard H. Axsom, is on view at New York City's Whitney Museum of American Art until mid-March; it then tours American museums through 1986. It shows, among other things, how a painter can go from mediocrity to real importance as a printmaker...
...Stella started making prints in the late '60s, and if he had quit by, say, 1975, he would not have added much to the sum of American graphics. Most of his lithographs and screen prints until then were small versions of his paintings, done up to ten years after the event, without much sign of the fierce inquisitiveness he showed as a painter. To expand, he needed a larger technology-and got it from two printing firms, Gemini G.E.L. in Los Angeles and Tyler Graphics Ltd. in Bedford...