Stella and the Painted Bird

By ROBERT HUGHES

In Fort Worth, a major show

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.

He was 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 to falter. What happened to him when he began to move out of the "reductionist" aesthetic that his work had done so much to create? "Stella Since 1970,". a show of 26 works organized for the Fort Worth Art Museum by Curator Anne Livet, with a brilliant catalogue essay by the art critic Philip Leider, now tells us.

Throughout the '60s, Stella's paintings had been very forthright. Indeed, the clarity of his decisions was the main reason for his reputation as a prodigy. The patterns were absolutely explicit; they straddled the surface like theorems.

But in 1970 Stella, dissatisfied with the plane surface of canvas--no matter whether its edges were an orthodox rectangle or not--began planning constructions, in homage to Russian constructivism and, in particular, its master Kasimir Malevich. Each painting (named after Polish and Russian village synagogues) was a shallow wall relief, built up of interlocking trapezoids and triangles of composition board that stuck out inches from one another and from the wall. Without one vertical or horizontal line in them, these tilting plaques had a mournful architectonic power. One experiences their juts and slippages as a form of physical stress. They were transitional works; but if the lyrical sap moves sluggishly in them, the same cannot be said of his Brazilian and Exotic Bird series --the constructed paintings, or painted constructions, that have occupied Stella since 1974.

Starting with the Brazilian series, Stella used the most precise-looking of all materials, metal, to carry the paint. Designing with it gave Stella's work a more overtly constructivist look than ever, in line with Malevich's prediction written 60 years before: "We see now technical means penetrating into the purely painterly picture, and these means may already be called 'engineering.' " Of course, a piece like Grajau I, 1975, is only fictive engineering-- it does not have to with stand the stresses of the real world, like a truss or a glider wing. But the machined look of those planes, and the clarity with which they are separated, had an important aesthetic result for Stella: the differences between one part of the painting and its neighbor were so clearly defined that the color could become hotter, freer, more complicated, without lapsing into decor. The titles of the Brazilian series are arbitrary -- they are the names of places around Rio de Janeiro, picked off a map. But they accord well with the tropical exuberance and intensity of Stella's new colors, the metallic yellows, fuchsias and purply blues that give the paintings their extraordinary mixture of lushness and rigor.

The Exotic Bird series, in preparation by 1975, pushed further in that direction. The odd titles, which sound like surrealist whimsy-- Mysterious bird of Ulieta, or, in a sardonic little pun, Steller 's albatross-- were birds' names picked from an ornithological textbook. The paintings court vulgarity every inch of the way. Their forms, based on the French curves used by architectural draftsmen, are cut from honeycombed aluminum. But they are loaded with color, blaring with the kind of greedy, apoplectic vitality. On first sight, they look as though a squad of glue-snorting graffitists had been let loose with crayons, spray cans and party glitter in a constructivist warehouse. Surfaces that Stella would once have left pure and flat are loaded with rich, scribbled color. The shapes slice and crash, in and out, mocking the conventions of flatness and integrity of the picture plane.

Yet Stella's control over his means is such that never once does one doubt the emphatic seriousness behind the display. He has at last discovered his own sensuality as a painter, and set it forth in what is, quite simply, the bravest performance abstract art has offered in years: manic energy channeled by an infrangible toughness of mind. Almost a decade ago, Leider's essay notes, Stella described his ambition-- "to combine the abandon and indulgence of Matisse's Dance with the overall strength and sheer formal inspiration of . . . his Moroccans. " Perhaps that goal, like the target toward which Zeno's arrow flew, can never be reached.

But the best of Stella's Exotic Bird paintings come closer to it than anything he, or any other artist of his generation, has done.

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