Frank Stella, who is 79, got up on a podium to make some brief comments at his Whitney Museum opening this week. He said he had a great time these past few weeks installing his current retrospective. But wait a second. Since when do artists install museum shows? Don’t curators exist precisely to guard against the perils of self-interest and guarantee that art exhibitions come framed in the requisite scholarly context?
Not exactly. “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” is very much an “artist’s hang,” and it is also a pretty thrilling affair. Instead of sticking to the usual museum approach whereby paintings are arrayed in chronological order and neatly chart an artist’s growth spurts, Stella – working with museum director Adam Weinberg – mixes it up. For instance, you find Stella’s chastely geometric paintings from the 1960s hanging in the same gallery as his swooping Moby Dick sculptures from the 1980s – sculptures whose jutting forms and decorative-bordering-on-kitsch surfaces were once seen as a predatory assault on the Minimalist movement he himself had pioneered.
[Click on “Listen” for Solomon’s full review, and her look at two other exhibits at the Whitney, a film installation by Rachel Rose and paintings by Archibald Motley.]
Perhaps the new Stella show is designed to avoid repeating MoMA’s two properly linear retrospectives in 1970 and 1987. Or perhaps Stella wants to establish that his oft-derided late works, especially the supersized space invaders, can hold their own quality-wise beside the radical early work. Although the show makes it difficult to understand Stella’s development and can be confusing, what it sacrifices in clarity, it makes up for in handsomeness and optical energy. So too, it succeeds in retiring the well-worn “early work vs. late work” argument.
Instead, look for the themes that remain constant – the force of nature, for instance. My favorite piece in the show is the floor-to-ceiling, uniformly silvery hunk of metal titled “The Raft of the Medusa,” which is set in front a window overlooking the Hudson River. Elegant and battered in equal measure, the sculpture looks like both metallic de Kooning and a piece of detritus fished out of the river.
“Frank Stella: A Retrospective” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 7, 2016.
Also on view: “Archibald Motley: Jazz Age Modernist” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Jan. 17, 2016 and “Rachel Rose: Everything and More” remains on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through Feb. 7, 2016.