Page 51 - Studio Internationa - March 1971

Supplement spring 1971

New and recent books

New monographs not think of Stella without thinking of future, Matisse is certainly relevant. Looking
Pollock. This is a view which one sometimes at the most recent Stella paintings, one could
Frank Stella by Robert Rosenblum.
hears now from painters (like John McLean, not but feel the pastoral strain in the School of
Patrick Caulfield by Christopher Finch. who wrote the introduction to the Hayward Paris, at its best in Matissean joie, updated to a
Robyn Denny by David Thompson. show, and whose own painting is Pollock-based); vivid and jangling Yes to the sixties, to New
Each approx. 64 pp with approx. 4o illustrations and it's a view that concerns the future, since it York. Some of the Protractors, some of the
in colour and monochrome. sometimes argues that Pollock was so great a Saskatchewan paintings, are extraordinarily
Penguin New Art Series, Penguin Books. painter that his huge example could not be moving in this way. I liked Philip Leider's
90p each:
followed, and that the springboard of affirmatory rhetoric a few months ago, about
The conditions of today's art irrevocably brand continuity in painting may well cartwheel right `triumphs of sheer confidence ... the identity
Frank Stella (born 1936) as an oldy. First shown over the sixties, over all the late sixties' we share in Stella's art as our art, the art of our
in the 'Sixteen Americans' exhibition in 196o, dissolution of painterly effect, into seventies time... of all things, joyous.' Yeah. Mind you,
summed up ten years later by the painting. though, these remarks came straight from
internationally-travelling retrospective we This programme could be the result of Madison Avenue, literally, and to be joyous
saw at the Hayward last summer, Stella now desperation in those whose impulses still lie there is to be precariously joyous; and there is
seems the quintessential painter of the sixties. with oil on canvas. That it's an unlikely no such arrangement of the emotions.
That's not to say we have finished talking about programme is in a sense non-discussable, since There is a necessary fragility of feeling
him. This new essay, which has most of Robert the future is the invisible. But it's a mark of surrounding the art of our time, the way we feel
Rosenblum's customary acumen and deftness Stella's importance that people should think in about it now and next week. Rosenblum is
of approach, is mainly interesting for its hints this sort of direction. Stella has made people certainly wised up to this; he sees how feelings
at new ways of thinking about the painter. rethink the historiography of modernism, with about Stella have changed, and can change again.
After all, Stella's most acute critics in the past a reorganization that is inseparable from Some of us used to think that Stella's pictures
were those who now seem least competent to ambition. But Rosenblum's gesture towards the were as brusque and unanswerable as aphorisms,
deal with post-Stella art. future has a distinctly unconfident ring. His high-art assurance working with the axiomatic,
That one can talk about such a thing as last paragraphs mention great hopes for the pace of change allied with the sureness, the
post-Stella art, and one can, is a tribute both Stella's stained-glass commission for a New authority of the leader. That was a sixties view,
to the painter and to those artists who have had York old people's home. Well, er, maybe. We and Rosenblum subverts it by his evident lack
to think about him. Rosenblum's position, shall see, and I hope the old people live to see it. of interest in, for a start, William Rubin's
however, is less a situation one than something But, as all authors know, when you get abstractionist approach, and more especially
that comes straight out of classical art history. towards the end of a book you have to start by the frankness with which he, like Leider,
Is Richard Morphet's series to be critical working in the good old affirmation-of-life opens to discussion the emotions of Stella's art.
essays on what is really new, or is it to be symbols, and I suppose that Rosenblum, who So the black paintings are hieratic, quasi-
instant art-history ? Rosenblum instinctively lives in New York, doesn't have many to hand religious, more like Rothko and a previous
argues about Stella from Delaunay and Matisse, at the moment. And the connection here is so American generation than we had thought.
not from the post-painting position which, I obviously with Matisse that I could not but Then the speed changes, but to Stella's
take it, is now held by those artists who are wonder whether Rosenblum does not suspect unique combination of stasis (symmetry,
concerned with what to do next. There could that Stella (born 1936) is not, in some sense, anti-facture, definiteness) with speed (running
be one exception to this; in Rosenblum's dead. lines, the feeling of a running composition,
insight, which may be wrong, that we should Talking about the past rather than the Kingsbury Run); De la Nada Vida is like

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