Modern man

IN RECENT decades Frank Stella, who is almost 80, has seemed increasingly out of step. A champion of pure abstraction in an age that distrusts purity and prefers its art to be topical, he is a survivor from a bygone era when artists conceived their mission as a heroic and hermetic pursuit. This aloofness is something Mr Stella relishes, claiming to have no interest in contemporary trends and dismissing Jeff Koons (to name one prominent target) as an artist for people with more money than taste. But a new show at the Whitney Museum, organised with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, reveals an artist more relevant than either he or his critics care to admit. The comparison with Mr Koons is particularly apt, since the current one-man retrospective is the first the Whitney has put on since its Koons show last year.

Mr Stella’s nonrepresentational works appear to have little in common with Mr Koons’s pop-derived imagery. But both display a penchant for pugnacious, in-your-face statements and a hands-off approach in which the artist maintains his distance from the production. Mr Stella’s more recent constructions—many of them plotted using computer-aided design and fabricated with the help of skilled artisans—share an industrial process with those by Mr Koons. In both cases the artist’s touch is suppressed; he acts as designer rather than craftsman, an orchestrator of pictorial concepts rather than a shaper of materials.

This similarity of practice is not incidental. When Mr Stella started out in the late 1950s, he was rebelling against the emotionally fraught painting of the New York School. His seminal “Black Paintings” (1958-60) consist of parallel bands made with a house-painter’s brush and enamel. While still handmade, they were executed without a trace of painterly expressiveness. Mr Stella’s paintings left no room for personal expression and made no claims to transcendence. From here, Mr Stella went on to create works in which he introduced subtle shifts in the flow of the stripes and cut into the canvas to conform to those predetermined patterns. These shaped canvasses, in turn, were followed by more elaborate variations in which he rung changes on the traditional picture plane, first in two and then in three dimensions. Conceived with logical rigour and carried out with deadpan precision, they denied that art was anything but material form.

Mr Stella once said of his art, “What you see is what you see”: a matter-of-fact attitude that set the tone for the emotionally cool era that followed the psychodrama of Abstract Expressionism. Once the basic premise was determined, the artist followed through with all the passion of a worker on an assembly line—an approach that characterised most of the work by his Pop contemporaries as well. Even when Mr Stella abandoned the classical austerity of these early works for the baroque profusion of his constructions, which tumble out like the contents of an overstuffed cupboard, the final product is the result of conscious decisions, problems to be solved, rather than spontaneous outbursts of an authentic self. A work like “Kandampat” (2002), a tangle of stainless-steel sheets and aluminium tubes that fly off the wall like plumbing fixtures caught in a whirlwind, results from Mr Stella’s desire to push the limits of pictorial space rather than an effusion of raw emotion.

This coolness links Mr Stella to the present. By denying that a work of art must be a precious handcrafted object, Mr Stella paved the way for later artists who were also inclined to view claims of spiritual transcendence with scepticism. Of course one can overstate the debt. Artists like Mr Koons are more the descendants of Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, artists who combine coolness with imagery drawn from the mass media. In this context Mr Stella seems to be involved in a rearguard action, defending the values of pure art against the barbarians who insist on dragging it from the museum and out into the street where it can engage with real life. But by introducing the techniques and, even more crucially, the attitudes of industrial production into the realm of the fine arts, Mr Stella provided a road map to the digital age where the idea of the hands-on artist is increasingly quaint.