Frank Stella, Die Fahne Hoch!, 1959

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?