Frank Stella

As Donald Judd insightfully writes in an early Martha Jackson Gallery review of the work of Stella, “Criticism is pretty much after the fact.  Frank Stella’s paintings are on the recent facts.  They show the extent of what can be done now.  The further coherence supercedes older forms.  It is not only new but better, not necessarily on an onlooker’s scale of profundity which can measure Pollock against Stella, but on the scale of making painting and sculpture of development.  The absence of illusionistic space in Stella, for example, makes Abstract Expressionism seem now an inadequate style, makes it appear a compromise with representational art and its meaning….The coherence is philosophical as well as technical, which seems obvious but which apparently is not, and so cannot be ignored.  It is, of course, pointless to imitate the appearance of Stella’s work or if anyone else’s or to consider it as a fixed point to be synthesized to be passed." 

Judd further notes that, “The geometric field  initially appears rigid, objective and somewhat oppressive.  The successive angles at the four corners align into diagonals.  That, the great distance between the lines and the paint reflecting differently cause the surface surrounding the angles to borrow the diagonal direction…The sensation is optical and definite.  The diagonals are free and electric in a static field." (Donald Judd, Complete Writings 1959-1975, New York, 1975, p. 57-58)