Product Description

"Working Space" affords an opportunity to view painting through the eyes of one of the world's foremost abstract painters. Frank Stella uses the crisis of representational art in 16th-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in the late 20th century. Professionals, students, collectors and art lovers should find Stella's non-traditional evaluations of the masters' work controversial and his fresh concepts provocative.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74791 in Books
• Published on: 1986-10-10
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

From Library Journal
In these Charles Eliot Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard, Stella has produced a critique of abstract painting that starts in the Renaissance and ends with Abstract Expressionism. Caravaggio's brooding chiaroscuro works locate for Stella the beginnings of modern painting. Stella posits these beginnings in Caravaggio's creation of a "working space," an enveloping pictorial space. Stella, an abstract painter himself, takes abstraction to task, but this is lucid, impassioned prodding from the loyal opposition. This is art history and art criticism of a high order, detailed and refreshingly idiosyncratic. Both scholarly and hip, Stella has written a book that reveals the painter's mind and studio, allowing us to see the play of history and vision that goes on within. Highly recommended for specialists and informed readers. Calvin Reid, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
Mr. Stella's way of dealing with single paintings, 36 of which are reproduced in color, makes for one tour-de-force after another...Paintings familiar and unfamiliar, from the 'Mona Lisa' to Wassily Kandinsky's 'Composition IX,' gain a just washed sparkle.
--Peter Schjeldahl (New York Times Book Review )

Working Space comes as something of a bombshell. For this is a book that explodes a great many received ideas about abstraction...[It] is certainly one of the most remarkable books ever written on the subject. What makes it so remarkable, of course, is that Stella is unquestionably the most celebrated abstract painter of his generation.
--Hilton Kramer (The Atlantic )

It is seldom that a major artist is prepared to commit himself publicly to a considered, large-scale survey of the art of his time, and to relate it moreover to substantial cross-sections of the art of the past. Frank Stella has done this in his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, with considerable erudition, great verve and genuine originality.
--John Golding (Times Literary Supplement )

Working Space develops its thesis with such gusto, elegance, and conviction...The text is rich with insight, integrity, and unexpected rethinkings of erstwhile familiar images.
--David Anfam (Art International )

This is a marvelously insightful and thought-provoking book...Stella's perception of the problem is correct--abstraction has reached a watershed. His analysis of that problem is erudite and plausible, and at times even passionate. If he does not solve it within these pages, he at least has made us consider its ramifications, and he has enabled us to look at art from a valuable and rarely available perspective.
--Edward J. Sozanski (Philadelphia Inquirer )

This is art history and art criticism of a high order, detailed and refreshingly idiosyncratic. Both scholarly and hip, Stella has written a book that reveals the painter's mind and studio, allowing us to see the play of history and vision that goes on within. Highly recommended.
--Calvin Reid (Library Journal )

About the Author
Frank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, and was educated at Andover and Princeton. An amazingly productive and energetic artist, he has created a large and varied body of work.

Customer Reviews

An important document
Frank Stella is one of contemporary art's most challenging and compelling figures. This series of lectures presents his view as to how nonrepresentational art has gone astray by focusing on an excessively cold northern tradition, following it from Mondrian up through the color-field painters. He looks now instead to a warmer mediterranean strain that he traces up through Reubens and Picasso, as his own solution to the possible deadness and flatness of so called "abstract painting". A clear and thoughtful example of how a contemporary painter turns his take on art history into praxis.

Working Space
Frank Stella's 'Working Space' is the publication of a series of Charles Eliot Norton lectures given in 1983-4. By this time of course, Stella's heyday was long gone- the 1960s, when Michael Fried and his acolytes could fuss over whether the latest Stella could "compel conviction." Similarly, Stella's time a young rebel was also firmly in the past. In 1960, Robert Goldwater chaired a panel on modern art, where Stella claimed that he "would welcome mechanical means to paint his pictures," a comment which provoked Goldwater into saying , "that man isn't an artist, he's a juvenile delinquent." Well, 20-odd years later, here's Stella as an establishment figure- a more mature (and undoubtedly more wealthy!) artist thinking a little bit more soberly about his place in the artistic tradition. In the last chapter, Stella admits, "To do what I was able to do, and what I am able to do now, I walk on roads built by others."

Chief among Stella's concerns here is the problem of abstract painting's seeming exhaustion by the 1970s- the well of inspiration running dry after the promises of High Modernism. What Stella proposes is that abstract painting needed to create some "working space," that is create something more than just a telescoped illusionism which merely shows us the foremost plane of a conventional picture. In order to illustrate his point, he goes back to Caravaggio, who he heralds as painting a more complete, holistic sense of space; that is a pictorial space which the viewer feels physically part of, rather than being on the outside looking in, as in Albertian perspective. We feel that we could easily cross the threshold into the fictive space of Caravaggio's paintings, and that equally, his figures could just as easily enter our physical space. But Stella notes tellingly, "I believe that Caravaggio meant painting to grow outside of itself." This is fascinating, because Stella here seems to be praising a kind of theatricality in the Italian's work, the very term which his friend Michael Fried would use to defend painting such as Stella's against Minimalism in 1967. (However, I have it on good authority that this is a misreading of Fried's notion of theatricality, so maybe Stella is not so contradictory here).

Indeed, this is the real issue for Stella. For painting's problem by the 1980s was not so much one of whether painting should be done this way or that way, but rather a problem of whether it could be carried on at all, especially given that painting seemed to contain within itself the seeds of other practices, something more "literal" or "theatrical." (This is true of Stella's own paintings from the 60s, which is what makes his observation of Caravaggio so revealing.)

Its always interesting to hear artists talk about other artists, and its these contradictions which make Stella worth reading. He makes some quite eccentric claims in these lectures, singing the praises of Picasso's 1920s figuration, where he seems to concede that abstraction has never found an adequate substitute for the human figure- this, from an artist who once said he was happy to see "humanist" values go down the pan! (Actually that was Donald Judd, but it was an interview with him and Stella). The last chapter in particular, where Stella discusses a very clumsy 17th century painting by Paulus Potter in relation to his own work struck me as the oddest claim of all, but then, that's the value of listening to an artist himself- with a different "take" on things compared to a critic or historian. These lectures are eloquently written too-Stella has obviously paid attention to the writings of his friend Michael Fried, and its paid off. (Maybe he got some help with them, who knows...) Its also beautifully illustrated, with Old Masters juxtaposed with Modernists such as Stella himself.

A Case for Space
I trudged through this book up until Stella made one point so poignant and concise that I felt absolutely no need to continue reading it. Stella makes a case for "The Religious Experience." The moment when a work of art becomes an indelible part of the literal space of the viewer, that moment when a viewer is so convinced of the reality and gravity of the pictorial space (or flatness)of a work that they accept it as truth and not just imagery. Stella's is a case for the connection of art to audience, and can be applied not only to pictorial space but also to the content of a work of art. A stance taken by other artists in other texts as diverse as Ben Shahn's "The Shape of Content" and David Hickey's "Invisible Dragon." And its still a battle worth fighting. Stella's fame came so early in his career and rooted in such a fragile idea, almost a gimmick, based on pictorial flatness that maybe he didn't stop to think about what he was doing at the time. Don't get me wrong he was thinking about something (an artist's fist ball up into fighting projectiles if you say they didn't put any thought into something). But if you've seen any relatively recent work by Stella you're probably want to say, "Whoah, is this the same guy I was forced to learn about in Art History class?" The answer of course is: No, its not the same guy. This book can help show you why. And for me, Stella has become a great example of an artist willing to treat his art as something more than a mere money making visual gimmick, but as a medium through which to explore and expound on topics that are a little hard to talk about with everybody without having them roll their eyes at you.