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Frank Stella

40 quotes

“Only what can be seen there [in the painting] is there.. .What you see is what you see.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1964 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From an interview (1964), as cited in Harold Rosenberg The Re-Definition of Art (1972), p. 125
“My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing.. ..all I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.. .What you see is what you see.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cited from Bruce Glaser "Questions to Stella and Judd", Art News (September 1966), p 58-59
“We believe that we can find the end, and that a painting can be finished. The Abstract Expressionists always felt the painting's being finished was very problematical. We'd more readily say that our paintings were finished and say, well, it's either a failure or it's not, instead of saying, well, maybe it's not really finished.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1966 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cited from an interview (1966), as cited in Gregory Battcock (ed.) Minimal Art, a Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press (1968), p. 157-161
“If you don't know what Ad Reinhardt's) paintings are about, you don't know what painting is about.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1967 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment after Reinhardt's death (1967), as cited in David Anfam Abstract Expressionism, London: Thames and Hudson (1990)
“I always get into arguments, with people who want to retain the old values in painting — the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1968 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in LIFE, 64:3 (19 January 1968), p. 49
“The idea in being a painter is to declare an identity. Not just my identity, an identity for me, but an identity big enough for everyone to share in. Isn't that what it's all about?!”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment (1960s), as cited in Irving Sandler The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, New York: Harper & Row (1978), p. 307
“When Morris Louis|Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody [like in Art News, by Tom Hess ] dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case... In every sense his instincts were Abstract Expressionist, and he was terribly involved with all of that, but he felt he had to move, too.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment (1960s), as cited in Irving Sandler The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, New York: Harper & Row, (1978), p. 319 n. 68
“The thing that struck me most was the way he stuck to the motif [in the 'Flag' and 'Target' paintings by Jasper Johns ].. ..the idea of stripes – the rhythm and the interval – the idea of repetition. I began to think a lot about repetition. [quote, 1960's]”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1978 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Comment (1960s), as cited in Irving Sandler The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, New York: Harper & Row (1978), pp. 215-216
“There are two problems in painting. One is to find out what painting is and the other is to find out how to make a painting. The first is learning something and the second is making something.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I can't stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting. After looking comes imitating. In my own case it was at first largely a technical immersion. How did Kline put down that color? Why did Guston leave the canvas bare at the edges? Why did H. Frankenthaler used unsized canvas. And so on.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I got tired of other's people painting and began to make my own paintings. I found, however, that I not only got tired of looking at my own paintings but that I also didn't like painting them at all. The painterly problems of what to put here and there and how to do it to make it go with what was already there, became more and more difficult and the solutions more and more unsatisfactory. Until finally it became obvious that there had to be a better way.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There's always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or surrealism, there's going to be someone who's not painting complicated paintings, someone who's trying to simplify...”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ken Noland would use concentric circles; he'd want to get them in the middle [of the painting] because it's the easiest way to get them there, and he want them there in the front, on the surface of the canvas. If you're that much involved with the surface of anything, you're bound to find symmetry the most natural means.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Donald Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural element. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of the color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract Expressionism started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I didn't want to mask variations; I didn't want to record a path. I wanted to get the paint out of the can and onto the canvas.. .I tried to keep the paint as good as it was in the can.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One could stand in front of any Abstract-Expressionist work for a long time, and walk back and forth, and inspect the depths of the pigment and the inflection and all the painterly brushwork for hours. But I wouldn't particularly want to do that and also I wouldn't ask anyone to do that in front of my paintings. To go further, I would like to prohibit them from doing that in front of my painting. That's why I make the paintings the way they are, more or less.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think I had been badly affected by ... the romance of Abstract Expressionism ... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like Art News and Arts, which I read religiously.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo ... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Responding to a question about 'gesture panting, as cited in William S. Rubin Frank Stella, New York: Museum of Modern Art (1970), p. 13
“I wanted something that was direct – right to you eye .. ..something you didn't have to look around – you got the whole thing right away.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I do think that a good pictorial idea is worth more than a lot of manual dexterity.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quote from William S. Rubin Frank Stella, New York: Museum of Modern Art (1970), p. 30
“I see my work, as being determined by the fact that I was born in 1936.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1970 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in ‎Philip Leider Stella since 1970: exhibition The Fort Worth Art Museum, ‎Fort Worth Art Museum (1978), p. 96
“The painting never changes once I've started to paint it. I work things out before-hand in the sketches.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1996 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Cited in Caroline. A. Jones Machine in the Studio, University of Chicago Press (1996), pp. 197-198
“If we are the best, it is only fair that they imitate us.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 1999 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in Alexander Alberro, ‎Blake Stimson Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (1999), p. 227
“The aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) first seen 2007 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As cited in Alan D. Bryce Art Smart: Art Smart: The Intelligent Guide to Investing in the Canadian Art Market (2007), p. 55
“[Asked: "Is that one of the reasons you went into sculpture?"] I don't know how I got into sculpture. I liked its physicality, that's the only reason. I didn't have a program.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They are more complex to begin with, but their organization, the way they end up being put together, isn't that different. You can't shake your own sensibility. No matter what the concept is; the artist's eye decides when it's right ... which is a notion of sensibility.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The paintings got sculptural because the forms got more complicated. I've learned to weave in and out.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I know what I want, but it's physically beyond me now. I can work on what I can handle. It's a playoff between the object and my physical limits.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I hate to say this. ..it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Time is what you have left.. ..you just march with it and use it the best you can.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When people still talk about art that I made in the 60's— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“People say that the paintings are always big because they're striving for effect, but they're also big so that I don't trip over myself, so that I have room to work, and people can come in and be comfortable.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There were two problems which had to be faced. One was spatial and the other methodological. In the first case I had to do something about relational painting, i. e. the balancing of the various parts of the painting with and against each other. The obvious answer was symmetry – make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth. A symmetrical image or configuration symmetrically placed on a open ground is not balanced out in the illusionistic space. The solution I arrived at, and there are probably quite a few, although I only know of one other, color density, forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern. The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution. This was done by using the house painters technique and tools.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can't think of anything I like less.. ..the 'Groupe de recherché d'Art visuel' actually painted all the patterns before I did – all the basic designs that are in my painting – I didn't even know about it.. ..it still doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting – sort of post Ma Bill school – a kind of curiosity, very dreary.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, the aluminum paint ... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see [[Jackson Pollock|[Jackson] Pollock]], [[Willem de Kooning|[Willem] de Kooning]], and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.”
Frank Stella (1936–2024) said by 2024 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source