Word: stella
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There are some artists whose precocity almost seems a curse, and one of them is Frank Stella, a wiry, taciturn American of Sicilian descent who turns 42 next month but whose work must seem (to younger painters) to have been around forever. For ten years, from the moment in 1960 when his black pinstripe paintings were exhibited at Manhattan's Castelli Gallery, Stella's work was one of the main points around which the critical debates of that logorrheic decade precipitated themselves...
...completely a child of abstract art. "Whatever interest I have in people," he once memorably told a reporter, "I have with them in daily contact. I don't want them walking around in my painting." Because of the extreme, not to say polemical, purity of his obsessions, Stella's work seemed exemplary. No young artist's oeuvre had ever been so exhaustively discussed, or used to support such a variety of critical positions. As a result, when enthusiasm for " '60s-style" abstraction started waning at the end of the '60s, Stella's prestige began...
...need to impose an artificial ordering. Perhaps this explains the paradoxical association between a choreographer who views neither music nor decor as a determining element of dance, and a succession of major composers (Cage, Christian Wolff, Earle Brown, Gordon Mumma, David Tudor, Pauline Oliveros) and artists (Robert Rauschenberg, Frank Stella, Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns...
...people Gene encounters on that trip add nothing. This undistinguished group includes Barnes, a writer of insipid mysteries with titles like Death of a Deb; Flash, sports entrepreneur and president of the North American Curling League, Stella the Divorcee, an oversexed blob usually clad in "Omar the Tentmaker" originals who does things Erica Jong is afraid to even dream about; and Lizzie, a confirmed epicurean who thinks truck stops are the "best places...
...living artists, whose expanding and developing talent has not yet been completely disse ted by critics and historians; the other a work by a painter whose stature does not warrant his being much appreciated by the public, but who is important to art students as an influential figure. Frank Stella's Red River Valley (1958) and Washington Allston's Diana in the Chase exemplify these two trends in the Fogg collection. The interests of art appreciators and art historians have often conflicted at the Fogg, but the present hanging of the lobby is an emblem of their cooperation...