FRANK STELLA AND A CRISIS OF NOTHINGNESS; A New Form of Artful Non‐Art Makes A New Philosophical
Statement

New York Times Jan. 19, 1964


Brian oˇDoherty


FOR years people have been complaining that much modern art is about nothing. Frank Stella's new
paintings at Castelli's, 4 East 77th Street, are so much about nothing they turn lack of meaning
into a thesis.

They look like nothing at all—merely triangles, hexagons and rhomboids of canvas, colored a grainy
purple, with concentric yellowish lines repeating these shapes inward to where a triangle, a
hexagon or a rhomboid is cut out of the center of the canvas, revealing the wall on which the
pictures hang. The paintings thus frame, surround and focus on — nothing, a rather obvious
metaphor. They are done in a neat, clerkish sort of way.

A hypothetical mass man invited in from the street would have no difficulty ignoring them. To one
aware of the dialectical footwork and history of modern esthetics, they could mean a lot. Which
goes to show that modern art (in some of its forms) is a matter of a simple stimulus throwing a
switch on the vast invisible superstructure of ideas the artist's ideal audience has to carry
around with it. Art like Mr. Stella's is a matter of initiation, a sort Of conundrum. Once you get
you get something out of it.

Thus it is blankly exclusive to a degree that would be contemptuous if contempt were the aim of
these works—which it isn't. Their main characteristic is total indifference. Valueless as art, they
are of interest because of the slightly Oblomov awesome paradoxes they imply, paradoxes relating to
a way of art and a way of individual existence. For these paintings are sophisticated refinements
of the anti‐art (and anti‐life) trend that has manifested itself in modern art by sporadic attempts
at suicide ever since Dada. Such crudities as indignation and protest—because they recognize
something to protest against—are passé. Meaninglessness is an absolute, not a relationship.

Part of the paradox of these pictures is that they seem to affirm the value of art while in fact
they destroy it. They have a pallid semi‐iconic air, a slight visual impact, a slight easily
satisfied Euclidian curiosity, like etiolated examples of the chart‐painting in the galleries, of
which Stella was a distinguished pioneer. These pictures purposely use a knowledge of art for a
sort of selfsterilizing operation. By cutting a void into the center of each canvas, the eye's
natural point of focus, they induce a sort of Pavlovian frustration.

At this stage one would be quite entitled to dismiss them as perversions of feeling, as forced
emblems of an emotional neutralism. Indeed, when looked on as art, that is exactly what they are: a
perversion of the function of art by using its formal repertoire to deny the possibility of
feeling.

The point is, however, that these works, like an increasing body of modern art, have ceased to have
esthetic significance, but are significant as a social symptom—something that parallels the
breakdown of formal criticism's capacity to deal satisfactorily with art of this nature. As a
social symptom one could call these works expressions of disgust at the system that consumes them,
condemnations of the people who buy them on the basis of ideas that they (the pictures) no longer
support. However, to my mind, these works are expressions of a new spiritual position that is of
great interest, even if (paradoxically) the art that transfers it is not. Which, by the way, would
make Mr. Stella a sort of philosophical journalist expressing ideas in visual terms.

These paintings are semi‐icons for a spiritual blank. They make Mr. Stella the Oblomov of art, the
Cezanne of nihilism, the master of ennui. An excess of objectivity turns his pictures into mere
objects, the artist into a conditioned reflex, transforming heaven and hell into a new sort of
spiritual vacuum that is modified only by his willingness to share it. Art apparently has nowhere
to go but down. What is fascinating about Mr. Stella is that, while apparently elevating its
powers, the has found a way to depress it further, which is not as easy as it sounds.

Thus his new paintings are unimportant. What is important is that they announce that a new kind of
human animal is around, a new response to living life—one that is anti‐emotion, anti‐human,
anti‐art (by trangressing its limits of expression or non‐expression) and that is even anti‐anti.
His pictures illustrate a sort of existential crisis that refuses even the action—or
commitment—that will reveal its condition to the self. Mr. Stella has used modern art to make the
supreme nonstatement. In the midst of the confusion and inverted values of art right now, I suppose
that's an achievement of a sort.