Frank Stella at 22

Sackler examines single year of painter's brilliance

February 12, 2006|Cate McQuaid, Globe Correspondent

CAMBRIDGE--It was a very good year.

In 1958, Frank Stella turned 22 and graduated from Princeton. The art world, which had been so intoxicated for a decade with the heroic swipes and drips of Abstract Expressionism, was developing a bleary-eyed hangover. It was the morning after, and all the grandstanding, the authorial egotism, and the extravagant gestures of the long night before were beginning to seem, in the light of day, a little stale.

''Frank Stella 1958" at Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum tears one page out of the great tome that is the history of modern art and illuminates a single moment with audacity and relish. This year in the paintings of a daring young artist captures his nascent vision coalescing from a cauldron of influences. The exhibition, organized by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art, and doctoral candidate Megan R. Luke, utilizes these early works of Stella's to chart his growth and to witness the pivotal moment when Abstract Expressionism gave way to Minimalism.

The show ends with two works from Stella's seminal ''Black Series," which led uber-critic Clement Greenberg to reconsider what constitutes a painting and paved the way for Stella's powerful 1960s aesthetic: He came to work in series, following carefully laid-out plans, creating works with repeating patterns painted in bands with crisp edges. Put together, these constituted a fervent retort to Abstract Expressionists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning. Near-mechanical, formulaic serial production undermined long-cherished values of originality and authorship.

Up until the ''Black Series" paintings, none of the pieces in this show (there are 21 paintings, collages, and assemblages; he made 37 works that year) were made serially. Not all the works are great; some are even unfinished. It doesn't matter: By increments, they illustrate Stella's evolution and his struggles. Cooper and Luke have grouped them into natural pairs and trios, presaging the series work to come.

They are shockingly, wittily painterly, dribbling and misting and soaking over and into the canvas. ''Tundra," painted before Stella graduated from Princeton and decamped to New York, sets what looks like a barred window against a field of mottled silver gray that is clearly an homage to Mark Rothko. But look at that barred window: black bands against a beige ground. Already, stripes were at the center of Stella's imagination.