Working Space (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Working Space by Frank Stella.

I should have known that it would take significant intellectual effort to get to a point with Working Space by Frank Stella that I could write something useful about it. Stella spoke at the 2016 memorial service for Walter Darby Bannard. He devoted his speech to an immensely detailed description of the pictorial mechanics of Darby’s paintings. From the standpoint of convention, it was completely inappropriate. But as I sat in the Princeton Club of New York feeling bad for everyone else in the room, it occurred to me that from where Stella stood at the podium, it was the highest praise imaginable. I didn’t know Stella, but I knew Darby, and if Stella didn’t have a warm side and a magnificent sense of humor, Darby wouldn’t have befriended him. That said, when Stella was on duty, he wielded one of the fiercest intellects ever to deal with abstract art.

Stella delivered these talks at Harvard in 1983 and ‘84, as the Norton series lecturer between Czesław Miłosz and Italo Calvino. I can often tell when an abstract painting was created in the 1980s because it seems everyone forgot how to make them. Even some 1980s-era Frankenthalers are shaky. Painters adopted fuschia and teal like they were going out of style (they in fact soon went out of style) and it became undeniable that high modernism had entered a Mannerist phase.

Helen Frankenthaler, Columbine, 1985, acrylic on canvas, 81 ¼ × 48 ¾ inches, © 2018 Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Inc./Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (source)

Stella knew something had gone badly wrong. “After Mondrian abstraction stands at peril. It needs to create for itself a new kind of pictoriality, one that is just as potent as the pictoriality that began to develop in Italy during the sixteenth century” (p. 1). The problem was that abstract painting was stylistically divorced from prior eras of art history. “Donatello and Phidias were available to Michelangelo in a way that Seurat was, but that Giotto and Celtic manuscript illumination were not, to Mondrian.”

Stella’s solution was to analogize his situation to that of painting after the death of Titian. Page 4:

Where were the heirs of Roman classicism and Venetian color going to come from? What painting was going to stand up to Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael? What painting was going to glow as brightly as Giorgione’s and Titian’s? The answer, of course, was Caravaggio’s painting. But few painters in the early part of the seventeenth century would have believed this except Rubens and possibly Velasquez; and today, even though many would concede Caravaggio’s importance, few would call him the successor of Michelangelo and a rival of Titian. But that is exactly what he became, and in doing so he created the kind of pictoriality we take for granted when we call a painting great, a kind of pictoriality that had not existed before.

Finding no tenable historical models available to abstraction, Stella singlehandedly forged one. It’s hard to overstate what an enormous act of intellect, astuteness, and will this was.

Venetian art had given itself to “uncontrolled lateral spreading and flattened surfaces,” while Roman painting became characterized by “a vacuous symmetry… where even spectacular perspectival invention and acrobatic foreshortening failed to fill the void.” Caravaggio found a way out:

[The] Beheading of Saint John the Baptist in Malta offers a kind of cinemascopic depth and an ovoid delimitation of space that enables painting to enhance the theatrical flatness of Venetian muralism, while in another vein his Vatican Deposition shows clearly how to activate a classicist void without falling into Mannerist excesses. In these two paintings Caravaggio signals the advent of modern pictorial space, exhibiting a power whose versatility and vitality may free us from the perpetual tyranny of the soft and the hard, the ragged struggle of the successors of Rubens versus those of Poussin. It may be that the sense of balance and proportion that seems so right in Velasquez and Manet comes from a mixing of their gifted painterly bias with this lesson learned from Caravaggio, the lesson that explains the efficacy and utility of expansive, close-up pictorial presence.

Cinemascopic depth, ovoid delimitation of space, expansive, close-up pictorial presence: one will recognize such themes in Stella’s work from the early 1980s and onward.

Frank Stella, Silverstone, 1981, mixed media on aluminum and fiberglass, 105 3/8 × 122 3/8 × 21 1/2 inches, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Louis and Bessie Adler Foundation, Inc., Seymour M. Klein, President, The Sondra and Charles Gilman, Jr. Foundation, Inc., Mr. and Mrs. Robert M. Meltzer and the Painting and Sculpture Committee, © Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York (source)

The ovoid reappears in Stella’s discussion of the Mona Lisa (p. 6).

What surrounds the figure might be hard to see right away: it is the shape of the space that Leonardo has created for the Mona Lisa. The configuration of Leonardo’s space suggests two beautiful, slightly bulging soap bubbles bound together. Their films join at the painting’s main spatial divider, at the columns enframing the landscape and the figure of the Mona Lisa. One bubble projects itself out toward us, engaging the balustrade, while the other curves away from us to catch the horizon line.

The image of soap film is meant to suggest a transparent membrane capable of enveloping and encircling space in order to give us a better sense of the idea of shaping pictorial space. By shaping its own space, painting makes itself incompatible with architecture, competing directly with it for control of the available space.

A few pages later it appears again as a metaphor for seeing (p. 9).

Seeing for the purposes of making art is basically a circular experience. Perhaps this experience is not as sophisticated as our perceptual capacities suggest it could be, but its goal — that of making art — is a difficult one. Art must be a communicable whole, and perception tends to be fragmented and self-serving. In the most obvious and fundamental way the artist wants to see what is going on around himself. His paintings, almost by definition, should have a spherical sense of spatial containment and engagement — a spatial sense, obviously, at odds with the boxlike mechanics most commonly and effectively used for the representation of space. An effective painting should present its space in such a way as to include both viewer and maker each with his own space intact. It is not that this experience should be literal; it is simply that the sense of space projected by the painting should seem expansive: expansive enough to include the viewing and the creation of that space.

Stella then invoked a theme that you will remember from our reading of Michael Schreyach’s excellent book on Barnett Newman:¹

The artist should strive to encourage a response to the totality of pictorial space — the space within and outside of the depicted action of the painting, the space within and outside of the imagined action of making the painting. The act of looking at a painting should automatically expand the sense of that painting’s space, both literally and imaginatively. In other words, the spatial experience of a painting should not seem to end at the framing edges or be boxed in by the picture plane. The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane is the burden that modern painting was born with. No one helped lighten this burden more than Caravaggio.

Stella complained (p. 12) that it is “the lack of a convincing projective illusionism, the lack of a self-contained space, lost in a misguided search for color (once called the primacy of color) that makes most close-valued, shallow-surfaced paintings of the past fifteen years so excruciatingly dull and unpromising.” He insisted (p. 19) that “The road to pictorial reality must pass through the dissolution of perimeter and surface.” Obviously Stella was describing how to make Stellas. But the insight promises to generalize beyond him. One shouldn’t take for granted the success of Stella’s self-reinvention after colliding with the limits of the planar canvas in the late 1970s. It worked, but there was nothing to assure that it would at the time. Stella’s courage merits admiration and emulation.

Too, Stella identified that the way Caravaggio solved an important problem of pictoriality is part of what made him modern.

In order to be able to do what he did, Caravaggio had to change the way things were done in painting in the late sixteenth century. The biggest change was made by giving painting its own space. He freed painting from architecture and decoration, and pointed out what painting’s proper relationship to patronage, both clerical and private, should be. But most important, he changed the way artists would have to think about themselves and their work; he made the studio into a place of magic and mystery, a cathedral of the self.

One could take that notion of a cathedral of the self to absurd extremes. But if applied seriously, the way Stella did, it’s an apt way to think about the disappearance of the person into the true problems of art, whatever they may be for the individual artist. With enough commitment, with sufficiently concentrated observances in that cathedral, one might hardly ever emerge, even to eulogize a magnificent friend.

I intend to spend more time with this book than previously allotted, and the ASBC calendar will reflect that shortly.

Content at DMJ is free but paid subscriptions keep it coming. Please consider one for yourself and thank you for reading.

Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Working Space by Frank Stella. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.

1. See the listings for Totality on the ASBC homepage.