Frank Stella

Die Fahne hoch!
1959

Abstract geometric pattern with thin, light lines creating a maze-like design on a dark background.

Die Fahne hoch! belongs to a group of twenty-four black paintings that brought the young Frank Stella instant art world notoriety. What appear at first to be white lines are actually bare, narrow spaces of unprimed canvas between the standardized black bands that the artist applied with a housepainter’s brush. Spanning a deep stretcher, the painting seems to project off the wall, asserting its presence, or what Stella called its “objectness.” There was nothing to this work, the artist declared, beyond the observable—as he put it in a now-famous maxim, “what you see is what you see.” While Stella insisted on the non-referentiality of his paintings, the German title Die Fahne hoch!, which translates as “hoist the flag,” is taken from the “Horst Wessel Song,” the Nazi Party’s marching anthem. Indeed the painting’s title, cruciform configuration, and flaglike proportions call to mind not only Nazi banners but the darkness and annihilation of the Holocaust. The phrase may also refer to raising the banner of a new aesthetic, one that marked a shift away from Abstract Expressionism and anticipated the geometry and rigor of Minimalism.

Not on view

Date
1959

Classification
Paintings

Medium
Enamel on canvas

Dimensions
Overall: 121 5/8 × 72 13/16in. (308.9 × 184.9 cm)

Accession number
75.22

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; gift of Mr. and Mrs. Eugene M. Schwartz and purchase with funds from the John I. H. Baur Purchase Fund, the Charles and Anita Blatt Fund, Peter M. Brant, B. H. Friedman, the Gilman Foundation, Inc., Susan Morse Hilles, The Lauder Foundation, Frances and Sydney Lewis, the Albert A. List Fund, Philip Morris Incorporated, Sandra Payson, Mr. and Mrs. Albrecht Saalfield, Mrs. Percy Uris, Warner Communications Inc., and the National Endowment for the Arts

Rights and reproductions
© Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

API
artworks/2964

Audio

Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959

In Frank Stella: A Retrospective

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Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959

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Narrator: In 1959, Stella began covering his canvases in straight, symmetrical, centrally organized black stripes. His radical, influential series of Black Paintings was the result. Frank Stella.
Frank Stella: I had this notion that, not so much the flatness, but the surface of the paintings would have a kind of integrity. They would uphold themselves and then you couldn’t move around inside the painting or follow the gestures or anything like that. It was a kind of all-or-nothing gesture.
Basically what I grew up with was anti-illusionistic bias. There was a lot of talk about truth to materials and having the sense that the surface was what it was, flat. The idea was to make paintings available―you know the cliché at the time was “eyesight alone,” but direct. So it was kind of like a visual imprint, so that when you saw something you reacted. Actually the feeling was, giving feelings to your eyesight, as it were, rather than taking one more step back into your psyche.
Narrator: Stella called this painting Die Fahne hoch! or “the flag on high.” The phrase comes from the first line of a Nazi anthem. Stella gave other works titles that explicitly recalled the Holocaust. To hear him talk about these titles, please tap your screen.