Stella Retrospective at Whitney 1

This red and black painting hung at the Modern when I was a young painter myself.  There are Motherwell's of a similar structure.

They must have influenced my own Achilles/ Tent painting, though subconsciously . Most definitely we liked the stripes and the bang they produced. Like on the dark side, Watch Out! 

An mysterious opening into space or a warning like a poisonous insect.

Classic paintings hard to photograph.

I like the shaped canvas which he wrestled with for the rest of his life-- between painting and sculpture. An image or the thing itself. The grey painting in rear a tunic of sorts, then, the star--.

Here is the beginning of a physicality and the question put to a painting. A thing itself or a representation in space.

Another side emerged, remember Noland was there too with the stripe and the athletic connotations.

It all then starts to become physical in a different way. Leading to the next years and a new pictorial representation in space.

Stella Retrospective at Whitney 2

These from the Moby Dick series I liked very much and still do. I like how the seriousness of the Black striped paintings comes out in a Mythic way. It is through the use of Picasso and forceful drawing.

The more decorative color of the preceding athletic type now has a rigor of the players themselves. They have a oppositional relationship like in Moby Dick itself.

The compositional aspects like in Elizabeth Murray, I guess are chiefly Picasso's again, but re created a new era here.

His Norton lectures, made into the book that we all had back then, Working Space, is interesting to note at this point. He went back to Caravaggio he says, always mysterious to me as I see Rubens more but he went back to explore a dynamic pictorial space adding that to the new physical reality of his work.

The earlier Painted Birds which I had liked so much back then, were under represented. These maquets are great and I remember trying to emulate them with beer cans and tin snips.

Stella Retrospective at Whitney 3

There is an over all completeness and it is nice in the explosive unevenness of his work, to see the threads of a continuing developing idea.

It is wonderful for the Whitney to still mount such a full retrospective with Stella's want to reach all boundaries. He touches on us all. A feeling I liked.

I felt lost as his work drifted into the outsized sculpture. 

It was some what a thrill back in the eighties knowing the reliefs were fabricated with aircraft aluminum. Somehow the technology was the right mix then.

The recent sculpture seems to exude this machinery and technology-- and it is impersonal-- something we have thought at times a plus-- but at this high end it becomes more and more, so what, another-- as it is still the ideas we look for what ever its fabrication.

It comes together here better than in recent gallery installations, just to bring it all to a satisfying close-- maybe he'll pull it off.