Frank Stella’s show at Jeffrey Deitch this past spring saw the artist bending his long-held investment in Caravaggesque “spherical-pictorial space” to farcical, triumphant extremes. When Stella died during the exhibition’s run, in early May at age eighty-seven, the show acquired an even more triumphant air. It was a high note for the artist to end on, if at a frequency not everyone could hear. Breathtaking affronts to taste, the five gargantuan, in-the-round “paintings” were either inspired by the keyboard sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti (these works were risibly mounted on wheels, à la Aeron task chair) or by salmon fishing in Quebec’s Cascapédia River (these suspended from custom hooklike armatures). The 3D knots were computer-rendered by Stella; slickly assembled with fiberglass or aluminum segments in the Low Countries; shipped to the artist’s Hudson Valley studio, where they were sprayed with lurid car paint; and finally transported to Manhattan via flatbed truck. (The eastbound lanes of the George Washington Bridge were allegedly shut down for safe passage.)
What to make of these things? Their pretzeled forms and molting, ribboned draperies refused to reveal themselves as single gestalts, thwarting Stella’s Minimalist mantra, “What you see is what you see.” Needless to say, it was a far cry from the Black Paintings (1958–60): pinstriped monochromes purged of illusionistic pretense and created when the twentysomething Stella was still daylighting as a housepainter. The artist’s career after circa 1980 could be seen as one epic, extravagant retreat from the asceticism and vulnerability of that jinxed breakthrough as he pushed his increasingly détraqué geometries into the realm of futurist kitsch. Yet the deductive early work has become the yardstick against which his subsequent art is measured, and he’s often portrayed by critics as a cautionary tale. Unfairly so. Sure, Stella’s Ahabian quest to exhaust and replenish the possibilities of abstraction increasingly accommodated a technocratic, bank-lobby aesthetic. But at Deitch, the lustrous colossi were still insisting on a mystery fundamental to art, and on their own deathless virtuosity, and it felt good to agree.