Collection Publications: Frank Stella

FRANK STELLA: PRINTS 1967-1982 When Frank Stella made his first lithographs in 1967, a graphic arts revival was underway. It was a propitious moment for the American print. The printers, trained at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles, had come of age and for the first time, America had more than one graphics studio and more than one print publisher. Printmaking had begun to lose its bad name as an artisan craft and its provincial status as an academic pursuit. Major painters, enticed by publishers and encouraged by master printers, tried their hands at printmaking. The graphics revival brought about astounding results. Artists produced prints of a new order, lithographs and etchings that had an authority until then associated mainly with European graphics; except that the prints were distinctly American: they were bigger than prints had been before, brighter, and often so technically proficient that they looked as if they might have been made in Detroit. Frank Stella's first prints differed from those of other painter-printmakers. At a time when many painters utilized sophisticated printing techniques or advanced industrial methods, Stella's intimately scaled prints were anything but flashy. Seldom larger than sixteen by twenty-two inches, often monochromatic, Stella's prints had a spare and dour presence. Prints followed painting compositions and, like the paintings, addressed issues of scale, flatness and shape. But only compositional similarities joined paintings and prints. Stella's prints were as intentionally graphic as his paintings were painterly. Although the prints made between 1967 and 1973 offer a record of Stella's stripe paintings, they neither replicate nor reproduce those pictures, nor was that the artist's intention. The plain and notched rectangles, squares and oddly angled, empty-centered polygons, when reduced and rendered in waxy litho crayon, assumed an entirely new aspect and function. Positioned asymmetrically, surrounded by white paper, prints from the Black, Aluminum, Copper and Purple series are meant to be held in the hand, studied and read like a book. They had in fact been conceived initially as a loose leaf album, an ongoing project to which Stella could add new images, but when that proved unfeasible, they were issued as single editions. The painter's concerns can be read in the prints. In a 1959 talk to Pratt Institute students, Stella explained his intention: "to force illusionistic space out of the painting at a constant rate using a regular pattern." The prints show us the regulated patterns and the shapes they echo. But illusionistic space comes with the territory of printmaking. So long as Stella put marks on paper, there was no way to escape printmaking's inherent figure/ground relationship, and no way to excise illusionistic space from the prints. He could have bypassed the relationship. By cropping paper, he could depict shape as emphatic; or by extending an image to the sheet's edge, he could obliterate the figure/ground relationship. But rather than cancel out that relationship, he tried only to neutralize it. Stella chose not to simulate paintings in print. While critics of the print revival accused painters of producing souvenirs in graphics, Stella drew a fine distinction between replication and documentation. His prints recorded the configurations of paintings; they illuminated concepts, but above all, they were drawings. He worked in printmaking as he did in painting, accepting the limitations of the media. To create flat surfaces, he drew hard onto the surface of aluminum plates; overprinted lithographic drawings onto matte, screenprinted grounds; and transposed V-shapes onto fine-ruled graph paper. He did not try to extend the media or push them around. Stella, one of the most radical painters of the time, created traditional prints. Until 1973, when he began the Eccentric Polygons, Stella's prints followed compositions of paintings almost exactly. In the Eccentric Polygons, Stella once again restates shapes from past compositions, the Irregular Polygon paintings of 1965-66, but the Eccentric Polygons differ in a crucial way. Where the surface of the paintings had been evenly painted and so taut that even their unlikely, often jarring color juxtapositions could not interrupt their flat ness, the surface of the Eccentric Polygons is broken and patchy. Colors are layered one on top of another. Parts of polygons are glazed. There are no even expanses. The white of the paper shows through. There is the suggestion of volume and the insinuation of illusionism. The Eccentric Polygons coincided with a major stylistic shift in Stella's art, a move away from the rigors of flat, geometric-shaped pictures toward kinds of illusionism. From 1970 to 1973, Stella completed the Polish Village Series, pictures that had collaged and raised surfaces, and in 1974, he began the Brazilian Series, pictures on constructed metal planes. For whatever reason, Stella was leaving behind the strictures of emphatically flat surfaces, a self-imposed limitation, and taking on, instead, the dread illusionism he had once banished from his pictures. The collaged surfaces of the Polish Village Series create raised and recessed areas, and the sometimes colored, sloping, angled planes of the Brazilian Series depend on spatial and painted illusions. Stella was not only questioning illusionism as we know it, but by rendering painted illusions literally in three dimensions, he was beginning to reinvent and redefine its relationship to abstraction. In the Eccentric Polygons, past and present converge; Stella's graphic restatement of an old form carries new ideas. It is as if once he had let the cat out of the bag and allowed illusionism a major role in his pictures, his approach to printmaking changed. After 1974, Stella's involvement with graphics increased and he mined the media for all their potential. He works serially: in the Paper Relief Series, Sinjerli Variations, and Polar Coordinates for Ronnie Peterson, he produces astounding variations on each theme. He works additively: first he collages paper onto the raised surfaces of the Paper Relief Series, then he hand-paints them. For the Polar Coordinates, he combines a printed curving grid, screenprint, lithography, glitter, and more than thirty-seven colors. And in an age in which information passes for knowledge, Stella creates prints so elaborate that their documentation (the technical breakdown of how they are made) tells us only that Stella does it his way. Paintings have continued to inform the prints, and often Stella uses the pencil study for a painting as the basis for a print. But the initial study functions only as a blueprint and guide, a starting-off point, not an end in itself. When he uses the pencil studies for his three-dimensional Exotic Bird pictures as the basis for a series of lithograph/screenprints, the original drawings yield forms for still more variations. Restating the linear maquette for three dimensional pictures onto a flat surface, he colors and marks each edition differently. The transposition has its ironic aspect. Mottled and metallic grounds, rife with illusionism, appear on flat gridlined paper; groupings of French curves, tools of geometry, imply the grand plumage of exotic birds. Placing geometric devices at the service of illusionism, Stella loads the surface of French curves with crayon scribbles and layered color, and shows how much depth a flat, abstract plane can hold. The Polar Coordinates for Ronnie Peterson bear only the slightest resemblance to their source: the gouache drawings for Stella's 1967-70 Saskatoon and Flin-Flan paintings. In those drawings, geo metric petals hold color and contain Stella's still teasing illusionism. In the prints, the petals have been transformed and extended; they burst with color, movement and shifting perspectives. They dissolve into decorative grounds and coalesce into colored shapes. Structural and decorative elements merge. "There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something." Stella's approach to painting, as described in his 1959 talk to Pratt students, applies to his prints. Since 1967, the adventurous painter has pushed the diffident printmaker. By restating and reworking painting compositions in lithographs and screenprints, by combining media, reducing images, adding a layer of lacquer, Stella discovered what prints can be. He has made simple, traditional prints with a lithographic crayon and prints that are best described as technical extravaganzas. He has educated himself in public, producing over a hundred separate editions before making the innovative Polar Co-ordinates, and in the process, he has become a masterful graphic artist. Like his paintings, Stella's recent prints explore illusionism and its place and position in an abstract picture. But prints no longer follow paintings. What goes on in one medium affects but does not determine what goes on in another. The grid that once maintained flatness curves across the surface of Shards to create an undulating perspective. The once implacable rectangle forms a window and there is a view from that window of the sea. In Shards, Stella is paying homage to his competition; the Shards allude to Cubism, Picasso, Matisse, decoration, Surrealism, and volumetric space. Images no longer join paintings and prints, process does. The residue of one project-grooves left on the wood by laser beams used to cut metal forms for Stella's 1981 Circuits pictures-becomes the inspiration for the Circuits prints. Stella liked the laser's tracings, the layered and recessed serpentine lines, and had them transferred to relief blocks to use as the basis for prints. The swirling lines move fast, like the racetracks from which the prints take their names. But the linear frenzy represents only one of Circuits' action-packed elements. Stella performs additive feats; heaping each Circuits image with information, he adds etching, engraving, fields of color and prints images on multicolored handmade sheets of paper. The effect is non-stop visual action; like traveling in a rushing car, the eye moves fast, takes it all in, and does not stop. The Swan Engravings, like the Circuits prints, are built out of material from the Circuits paintings: scraps and shards of discarded metal. Combining the salvage, Stella forms a collage plate and reworks it with etched lines, engraving, areas of open biting. In Circuits, he layers the visual action ; in the Swans, he fragments it. The randomly shaped elements appear arbitrarily placed. Nothing connects the impression of a lacy doily to etched scribbles standing in relief. Rather than come together, the separate elements, sitting side by side, cause jarring breaks. Only the handling of surface, the tonal variations achieved by the printing of rich blacks, raw whites and gritty grays, connects the disparate elements. The Swans are not one-shot images; to see the whole print requires reading each separate part. Since 1967, Stella has traveled an extraordinary distance as a printmaker and achieved an equally extraordinary range. He began, if diffidently, making traditional prints that, in concept, are more closely aligned with sixteenth- and seventeenth century album prints, designed to be placed in books and stored in print cabinets, than with the large, colorful lithographs that dominated the late 1960s. As he has grown more comfortable with the media, he has become more innovative. But he has kept his initial graphic focus. The Swans, for example, with their fragmented surface of disjunctive patterns, declare new ambitions for abstraction and show us how far Stella has moved from his heraldic, systemic paintings of the 1960s. But the Swans are also very much about printmaking. They rely on graphics' essential properties: on the texture and tones of blacks and whites, on linear details, on marks that can be realized only with acids and grounds. The Swans, in fact, are the kind of prints a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century graphic master might have made had he lived in an age of abstraction.

-- Judith Goldman