Page 50 - Studio International - February 1969

London the other, and (2) two semi-circular, protrac- great colorito painting seems magical: 'How

tor-like shapes which cross halfway, filled out could anyone have conceived of that
commentary with parallel bands of colour—here not only particular red,' I literally wonder). Let me
the same width but also the same shape as the add that I don't think that this attitude limits
border rims, which are, in turn, as in (1), or disqualifies an artist or critic from using or
Frank Stella at Kasmin; 'Hung by Scarfe'— determined by the physical semi-circularity of appreciating colour. In fact it increases his
lithographs and sculpture by Gerald Scarfe the canvas. The two rectangular paintings are impersonal objectivity, which is the way to
—at the Grosvenor. like exercises in squaring the circle; one is two make him—if he is a classicist—function better.
squares, or a circle and two halves, long; the It is like being able to dig somebody else's
other is a square and a half, or a circle and a pornography. It is beyond personality, beyond
half, long. Ambiguities of pattern formation the ego altogether.
I find it strangely difficult to write about arise because there is a tension between the This is the reason, after making a lot of
Frank Stella. When I was in college a few interrupted circles and the fragments of earlier paintings which would seem almost
years ago I used to wish I were Frank Stella. squares, and there is a sensitive balance to prefer to be colourless and which appear
It wasn't that I 'loved' his work, because it between the two simultaneous possibilities, to be coloured only in order to avoid the
often seems to me that one psychological func- since you need stronger, more emphatically oldest colour cliche of all, black and white (I
tion of art is to help you to understand that whole, circles than squares within a rectangu- think Matisse may have invented his beauti-
you are one thing philosophically (the anci- lar format to get a balance. This is why these ful, uniform, omnipresent blue as a substitute
ents, classicism, geometry, designo) just so that rectangular paintings are by no means a re- for the banality of black) — the reason why
you can play your love on its opposite. For treat from the shaped canvas. Stella has pro- Stella feels as free to combine opulent
this reason all that his paintings provoked in gressed past experience to innocence, and he Rococo colours as though he were ordering
me was gross jealousy. I was annoyed that he uses the rectangle of the canvas as actively as an Italian ice cream cone. This is a quite
already existed. I should make it clear that I if he had discovered it anew. Sub-shapes de- different arbitrariness from Fauve colour,
had no desire to be a painter. The only cause velop out of the square/circle overlap—tap- much less aggressive and disruptive not only
for jealousy was that if he hadn't done it it ered losenges and inventive, Matisse-like trun- in the colours it picks or invents but also in
might at least have been fun to do; there was cations of flat, bowed forms. what happens when it puts them together. It
certainly no point in doing any other kind of These are quite insistently colour paintings, is like Charles Ives piling up melodies and
painting. So if this piece seems at all puzzling despite the cool strength of their geometry. not getting cacophony.
it is probably because I feel like somebody Now, to us classicists, colour doesn't matter When I say the colours are arbitrary I don't
born six years later than Galileo who had had too much. Usually I prefer black-and-white mean that they are not intelligently planned.
some hunches about falling bodies, but who photographs (even to actual objects some- The eight parallel segmental arcs of both
could then work up no other enthusiasm for times), and I wonder whether it would be halves of the semi-circular diptych, for
physics. better—more rational—if we saw in pure instance, take the band sequence A, B, C
There were four new, as yet untitled, paintings values, as dogs are supposed to do. Colour H on the left and reverse it, H, G, F... A,
at the recent KASMIN show, two rectangular doesn't seem to count unless it's used like one on the right, and tones and values are as
and two shaped. The shaped canvases are (1) element in a diagram (as for example, in deliberately—if less obviously—worked out in
a semi-circular diptych composed of two Neo-Impressionist or Kandinsky's colour other works. If form is body, colour is soul;
quadrants of a circle, each quadrant of which theories), or unless it serves to give body and the classicist sees the soul's presumptuous
has a surrounding border which encloses substance to light (Baroque painting, Im- immortality as trivial beside its real function,
eight parallel segmental arcs—of the same pressionism, etc.) Colour never really seems which is to vitalise a particular body. Con-
width as the border—the colour sequence of significant to me unless it is noticeably wrong sequently, Stella works like a god : the forms
the arcs being reversed from the one panel to (as in colour television) or unexpected (as all are perfect and immutable, so you might as

Frank Stella, untitled 1968
8 x 24 ft. Kasmin Gallery
2
Frank Stella, untitled 1968
8 x 12 ft. Kasmin Gallery