The Grand Maximalist

By ROBERT HUGHES

Frank Stella is 51 this year, too old to be a prodigy but still young for an artist, and his second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City -- consisting of work done since 1970, the year of his first one -- has just opened. He is one of the very few 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.

Is he 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 out. From the fascist lugubriousness of early striped paintings like "Die Fahne hoch" to the galvanic dance of fake-shadowed solids in the Cones and Pillars series of the '80s, from the decorative pastelly flatness of the late-'60s Protractors to the wave of polished aluminum, gray as sea fog, that swells across the wall of MOMA in a magnificent piece with the Melvillean title of Loomings, 1986, Stella wrings more pictorial feeling from abstract art than anyone else alive. His big paintings, when they come off, are almost unique in their confidence: they project a sense of grandeur rather than the usual American inflation of scale. They are also marked by their will to confront, to deal their aesthetic cards face up, as plainly as possible.

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 El Dorado, opens with a group of eccentrically geometrical wall reliefs done in 1971-73. They were inspired by photos of the wooden architecture of Polish village synagogues obliterated in World War II. They were essentially constructivist, based on the relation of parts rather than (as in his earlier work) the repetition of units. They looked complex, clean and rather dull, and one could not have deduced from them the stylistic convulsion Stella was readying.

By 1975 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 by the Exotic Birds in 1976-80: images so unexpected that Rubin is right in calling them not just a stylistic twist but the start of a second career.

For Stella now took the minimalist obsession with fabrication (as distinct from handmaking) and used it to carry all that was maximal: sweeping gestures, textural scribbles, hot collisions of color, a romantic sense of barely sustained cohesion. But Stella's "new look" of spontaneity was itself a kind of theatrical fiction. The pragmatic essence of the early paintings 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."

Up to the late '70s his reliefs had stretched the conventions of relief without really departing from them: they had a flat solid background plane from which the bright templates sprouted as figures on a ground, and however "wild" the color seemed, it was always anchored within the coordinates of collage or, at least, given the enormous size of pieces like Inaccessible Island rail, 1976, of screw-bolt-and-bracketage. Stella's 3-D paintings all descend from constructivism, and one soon realizes that they mark the end of its tradition with a barrage of fireworks: there is something funereal as well as celebratory about the sight. It seems improbable that anyone (other, perhaps, than Stella) will manage to wring more from the constructivist impulse. If you want to see the common ancestor of these frenetic and space- grabbing objects, it is upstairs at MOMA, a little thing of rusty tin: Picasso's 1912 Guitar. Thinking about Picasso, Stella had come to realize that "it's not the presence of a recognizable figure in Picasso that in itself makes things real, but his ability to project the image and to have it be so physical, so painted."

Stella had to kick free of the literal basis of color-field painting; the flat color on a flat plane, the "dictatorship of the medium," had killed off the project of making abstract forms that, by moving in deep pictorial space, reawakened one's sense of the body. His way of doing this, in paintings from the Indian Birds series like Ram gangra, 1978, was to get rid of the solid back plane and replace it with a mesh support, so that the shapes seemed to hang in the air. The relatively sedate movement of form in Stella's earlier work became an agitated, dense array, and the vividness of color seemed to have gone over the edge of decorum: a demotic yawp of rose, cerise, blue, sulfur-yellow, greens and oranges, scribbled and slathered onto the baroque shapes of French curve and drafter's template, and heightened with jarring patches of colored glitter.

Not long afterward, the vogue for graffiti would release floods of glitzy dreck that shared the same eye-grabbing fervor. Indeed, both were grounded in the same area, a sense of common life, but only Stella was able to make it work aesthetically. Those who think abstract art should betoken "spirituality" are bound to be put off by the materialist cast of mind that lends its here-and-now toughness to even the most florid of Stella's works. Relentlessly inventive, marred only by the glaring, grinding overcomplication of some of his pictorial machines, he is a paragon of mental horsepower. His show affirms that no painter need be the prisoner of the ends of art history.