Exhibition | Frank Stella Unbound: Literature and Printmaking
Can an abstract painting tell a story with the same persuasive power and expressive drama as a narrative scene? What is the future for abstract painting—following the artistic brilliance of Pablo Picasso, El Lissitzky, and Jackson Pollock, can it continue to lead to breakthroughs and advances in artistic expression? In 1984, Frank Stella, Princeton Class of 1958, began an exploration of these questions. Over the next fifteen years, he created four print cycles titled after published narratives that rely on exaggeration, fantastical events, and imaginary space—the literary equivalents of expressionistic drama, pictorial illusion, and abstraction.
Characteristic of Stella’s Had Gadya series are volumetric renderings of cones and pillars taken from a nineteenth-century manual used to teach architects and stonecutters how to measure and draft the building blocks of neoclassical architecture. Collaged onto the surface of the print, these graphic depictions extend beyond the edges of the paper to emphasize the material space occupied by each work. This technique also inspired a group of high-relief sculptural paintings composed of intersecting geometric shapes cut from aluminum, fiberglass, and etched magnesium and titled after Italo Calvino’s anthology Italian Folktales (1956), which had recently been translated into English. The dynamic exchange of ideas between Stella’s print series and the painted sculptures reversed again when he reprised titles and formal elements from three of these multimedia paintings to create a group of eight new prints. In the case of Bene come il sale, the composition changes subtly in each of the four states of the print, much as the details of an oral story may shift with each retelling.
These ambitious series represent a crowning achievement in Stella’s graphic oeuvre. With them, he developed printmaking techniques that yielded works of extraordinary visual dynamism, scale, and technical achievement, imbuing his compositions with a drama that parallels the power of the printed word. On the occasion of the artist’s sixtieth reunion, Frank Stella Unbound draws together works from each of these series with the books after which they are titled. Reflecting on his practice in 2014, Stella explained, “Abstraction didn’t have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes. It wouldn’t be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense.” In marrying the creative spirit, imaginative possibilities, and narrative structures of literature with the processes of printmaking, Stella transformed his working methods and visual language in ways that continue to inform his artistic explorations.
Mitra Abbaspour
Haskell Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art
Calvin Brown
Associate Curator of Prints and Drawings