It has been almost 30 years since an American museum mounted a major retrospective of Frank Stella. The Boston-born artist has been making art steadily since the 1950s, and his body of work numbers more than 3,000 pieces, many of them large. However, New York’s Whitney Museum managed to mount such a piece last fall, and now its blockbuster Frank Stella: A Retrospective makes its way to Fort Worth.
Stella first became famous for his series of “Black Paintings,” large canvases with black paint pinstriped by thin unpainted lines of canvas. These flatly textured works were a cool and unemotional response to the thick colors of highly expressive paint used by abstract expressionists like Pollock and de Kooning. Since then, Stella’s work has been in a constant state of evolution, moving into brightly colored canvases, then paintings on metal, then collages, and finally fully fledged freestanding sculptures. While the pieces he has made since the 1980s or so have been criticized for shallowness and trotted out as evidence of an artist in decline, there’s no denying the outsize influence that this painter/sculptor had on the mid-20th-century’s aesthetic. His show is up through the summer at the Modern.
Frank Stella: A Retrospective runs Apr 17-Sep 18 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St, FW. Admission is $4-10. Call 817-738-9215.
