Expanding What Prints Can Do

By ROBERT HUGHES

Frank Stella's graphics take on the size and power of paintings

The 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.

A wiry Sicilian American, he had stepped out of Phillips Academy and Princeton into immediate notoriety through his "Black 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 of art in the past ten years--the move from silence to noise, from polemical emptiness to glutted fullness--had been written, ahead of time, in Stella's work.

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 if, and only if, he gets the right help from the right people. Making prints is a collaborative art, and the job of a master printer is to show a painter what is possible.

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, N.Y.

Gemini was known for the obsessive, flawless precision of its printing. It encouraged Stella to make large images by using silk-screen or flat-bed lithography from metal plates--means that more "purist" printmakers, wedded to the nuances of stone lithography, tended to reject as commercially tainted. Stella began to push printmaking toward the scale of painting. The climax of this process was reached in an extraordinary series of prints he did with Tyler Graphics from 1980 onward.

The basic motif of these prints is racing circuits. The places the new prints are named after--Imola in Italy, Pergusa in Sicily, Talladega in Alabama--are all professional speed tracks; their plans, sinuous and flexing, are echoed in the serpentine calligraphy of the images. Naturally, though, they are much more than layout. Stella's drawing, in a print like Pergusa Three, has a kind of wristy expansiveness; its loops and contours recall 1930 Picasso, as does Stella's elegant play with collage in the lacy patches within the curves. At times, as in Talladega Three II, the printed surface gets jammed to overload with baroque writhings: it is as though the space left between the wriggling planes of his relief paintings had been crushed down into two dimensions, flattened like a can on the road. Such prints take disorder to the edge of surfeit, the more so because they are so big--5 1/2 ft. by 4 ft. of handmade paper. They have the size and power of painting, and much of its coloristic resonance.

Moreover, there is an interesting give-and-take between Stella's recent paintings and his prints. They cannibalize one another, in a way. His latest series, the black-and-white "Swan Engravings," is printed from etched magnesium sheets that include the offcuts from his huge metal-relief paintings. Butted together like a big collage, these fragments--some ready etched with existing textures, others reworked--provide an inordinately rich field of arcs and patterns. The conjunction of Stella and his master printer Kenneth Tyler promises to change everyone's sense of what printing can do. --By Robert Hughes This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.