Frank Stella
1936–

Narrator: [Frank] Stella painted these large, abstract paintings when he was a young man.  

Mark Joshua Epstein: I think these early works take a lot of extended looking. The white lines that Stella has left showing through the black paint take a long time to find themselves to your eyes.  It’s almost as if you’re trying to look at something in pitch black and you need to give your eyes time to adjust so that you can really see the details. There’s all of this brushwork that comes through. These lines aren’t exactly—they don’t look like they’re made by machines. They’re definitely made by humans, and you see his brushwork and the evidence of the artist’s hand, which I think is really cool in this work.

You also notice that the paint that he’s using shines in certain spots more than others, and that’s because it was household paint. It was paint from a hardware store, and sometimes the finish was a little bit uneven.  

I think this work looks kind of plain because Frank Stella was really getting to the basics of painting, and he’s trying to really narrow it down to see, if I take out almost everything, can I still make a picture? And what will that picture look like?

Narrator: Red, red, and more red.

Mark Rothko used very thin washes of color on top of very thin washes of another color to give paintings like Four Darks in Red a luminous depth.

What happens to the colors the longer you look?

In some cases you might be able to spot one color glowing through the thin layer of paint on top of it. Crimson here, rust there, and a rich maroon other there. And look at the second shape from the top—you might almost imagine getting lost in that deep, textured black. For Rothko, the drama was in the play of the colors and shapes.

Rothko wanted viewers to get close to his art and experience the big emotions he felt while painting. How does it look from the middle of the room? How is it different if you get closer—three or four feet away from the canvas?

Adam Weinberg: Cuando en 1959, el artista Frank Stella mostró por primera vez esta pintura en el Museo de Arte Moderno, el público quedó perplejo ante su austeridad. 

Narrator: Adam Weinberg es Director Alice Pratt Brown del Whitney Museum. 

Adam Weinberg: Stella respondió: “Lo que ven es lo que ven. Para mí, la pintura es un pincel en una cubeta, que se pone sobre una superficie. Para mí no hay otra realidad que esa”. El artista quería crear obras metódicas, intelectuales y despojadas de pasión. Algunos consideraron que aquello no era sino un repudio de todo lo que le había antecedido, un sistema racional carente de placer y personalidad. Pero otros percibieron que las pinturas negras generaban un aura de misterio y solemnidad.

El título de esta obra, Die Fahne Hoch, significa literalmente “el estandarte izado”. Viene de un himno marcial de la organización de las juventudes nazis. Stella destacó que las proporciones de este lienzo son muy similares a las de las grandes banderas desplegadas por los nazis. 

Sin embargo, el contenido de la obra no hace referencia a elementos ajenos a la propia pintura. El diseño se deduce a partir de la forma del lienzo: el ancho de las franjas negras está determinado por el ancho de las barras del bastidor. Las líneas blancas que separan las anchas franjas negras están creadas por áreas angostas del lienzo sin pintar.

Narrador: [Frank] Stella pintó estás grandes obras abstractas cuando era joven. 

Mark Joshua Epstein: Creo que estas obras tempranas requieren de una observación prolongada. Las líneas blancas que Stella dejó para que se transparentaran a través de la pintura negra tardan mucho tiempo en hacerse claras a la vista. Es casi como si uno intentara ver en medio de una oscuridad absoluta y necesitara dar a sus ojos un tiempo para ajustarse, para poder realmente ver los detalles. Hay una gran cantidad de pinceladas que se hacen patentes. Estas líneas no son exactamente… No parecen estar hechas por máquinas. No cabe duda de que han sido realizadas por un ser humano, y uno las ve y ve las pruebas de la mano del artista, lo cual es algo que me encanta de esta obra.

También se aprecia que la pintura que usa brilla en ciertas zonas más que en otras, y ello se debe a que era pintura de uso doméstico. Era pintura de ferretería y, en ocasiones, el acabado era algo irregular. 

Creo que esta obra tiene un aspecto un tanto sencillo porque Frank Stella realmente se estaba acercando a la esencia de la pintura y estaba intentando reducirla al máximo para comprobar si, deshaciéndose de casi todo, podía aún crear una pintura y, en ese caso, qué tipo de pintura.

Adam Weinberg: When artist Frank Stella first showed this painting at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959, people were baffled by its austerity.

Narrator: Adam Weinberg is Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.

Adam Weinberg: Stella responded “What you see is what you see. Painting to me is a brush in a bucket and you put it on a surface. There is no other reality for me than that.” He wanted to create work that was methodical, intellectual, and passionless. To some, it seemed to be nothing more than a repudiation of everything that had come before it—a rational system devoid of pleasure and personality. But other viewers saw that the black paintings generated an aura of mystery and solemnity.

The title of this work, Die Fahne Hoch, literally means, “the banner raised.” It comes from the marching anthem of the Nazi youth organization. Stella pointed out that the proportions of this canvas are much the same as the large flags displayed by the Nazis.

But the content of the work makes no reference to anything outside of the painting itself. The pattern was deduced from the shape of the canvas—the width of the black bands is determined by the width of the stretcher bars. The white lines that separate the broad bands of black are created by the narrow areas of unpainted canvas. 

A.M. Homes: And I think for me, looking at Mark Rothko paintings was, for lack of a better description, the first time I saw myself in art. 

Narrator: Novelist A.M. Homes.

A.M. Homes: I also think it’s an incredibly compressed field which always amazes me that he is able to take everything from horror and ecstasy and pure, sheer rage and the most sublime, delicate, wonderful experience and boil it all down and render it as indivisible. Each element is there and you can't even begin to break apart which one is which.

I think that he achieves in his paintings what I'm trying to achieve in fiction. Which is that expression of the things that go unseen and unsaid and unarticulated. And I'd never seen anything—color, gesture, texture—represent an emotional experience so fully. So that meant an incredible amount to me.

The story of me and Mark Rothko is that when I was a kid, my father, who's a painter, used to go every weekend and look at art in Washington. And every weekend, I would eventually go with him. Because in addition to being a lover of art, my father was also incredibly picky about what foods we ate and what we could have in the house. And he was a real health food fanatic early on. So we had no cookies, we had no cake, we had no twinkies or hohos. We also couldn’t have grapes that weren’t picked by union workers and no iceberg lettuce and no soda. But if you went with my father to look at art, at a certain point he could break down and he would take you to the cafeteria. And in addition to not allowing sweets he also kind of got overwhelmed in the cafeteria because I think it was his big moment as well and so you could pick out whatever you wanted. And you could usually pick out more than one thing. So you could have pie AND Jello which I think was almost anti-religious in our family. And I would go with him, and I would sit in museums all over Washington, looking at art for hours and hours and hours, and having this accidental art education where I would just stare at the painting sitting on benches waiting for him. And in the end it turned out it was really incredibly marvelous. And I discovered Mark Rothko among many other artists. And had very nice pie at the end of the day. And I think it's in a large part how I became who I became.