Rings of Art
Frank Stella, One of the Most Renowned Artists of
the Late Twentieth Century, Has Been Using Cigar Smoke as an
Inspiration
by Nancy Wolfson
It is a rainy May morning in Frank Stella's cavernous studio in
Manhattan's East Village. The click of sprockets on a reel-to-reel
projector echoes in the darkened room. The image cast on a standing
portable screen is of a suspended, grayish-white swirling mass. In the
darkness, the silhouettes of some 13 girls and boys seated on aluminum
chairs in front of the screen are visible. Frank Stella and his wife
Harriet stand together behind the group, while an assistant operates
the low-tech video equipment. A high-pitched young voice speculates,
"It looks like cells." "I think it's water." "Silk!" guesses a third.
"Actually, they are smoke rings," Stella reveals.
Thirteen-year-old Peter Stella has brought his art class on a field
trip to his father's studio. The abstract artist is relating how the
smoke ring imagery found its way into his recent work. "Blowing smoke
rings while smoking a cigar, I observed the smoke turning and spinning
on itself," he explains. "It's a vortex. In the process of becoming
this smoke ring, and then bifurcating and dissolving, a lot of
interesting things happen, and beautiful, fluid forms are
created. It's a nice image, both to look at and work with."
It's not quite as simple as that. Stella blows smoke rings into a cube
lined with black velvet. Still cameras in each of the six sides enable
Stella to shoot the smoke rings from all angles at regular
intervals. A computer scans and analyzes the still photographs then
renders both two- and three-dimensional representations of the form,
the latter a sort of layered construction diagram. Stella then
generates many printed versions of these: some done by currency
engravers in Sweden, others enlarged and printed in an array of colors
by lithographer Ken Tyler, who has worked with Stella since
1967. Stella can draw on these printed images with a crayon and liquid
tusche or paint on them with a brush or spray paint. The forms become
part of busy collages that are photographed and then blown up,
projected on an even larger surface and finally painted. From the
layered construction diagrams he also builds solid plastic models,
which he uses to make sculptures.
Smoke rings are just some of the configurations Stella weaves into his
various works in progress. There is a sort of organized chaos in his
light-filled two-story studio, which contains scaffolding and tables
piled with paint containers, masking tape, books, small-scale
architectural models, paintings, sculptures and cigars. He is
composing what will be two-sided paintings on large, freestanding
curved fiberglass walls, showing at Manhattan's Leo Castelli gallery
in November. He is also making outdoor metal sculptures for a late
fall exhibition inaugurating the new Gagosian Gallery in Beverly
Hills, designing mammoth murals for a 55-story office tower in
Singapore and for a hotel in Seoul, and producing a series of
prints. This eclectic productivity is standard Stella, who in a nearly
40-year career has explored painting, sculpture, collage, relief
painting and architecture, employing an equally diverse assemblage of
materials and techniques.
The artist sees the shifts in his work as part of a process: "Each
painting takes a kind of concentration, and you work on an idea, and
then you work on it more, until suddenly it somehow exhausts
itself. Or it exhausts you. But usually in the process,
something about it sends you off in a new direction. And you have to
change the way you're doing it in order to explore the new idea
further," Stella says, referring to his ever-increasing variety of
mediums. "Things do change, but [they are] conditioned by what went
before. They're just continuations of things you're working on that
sort of permute themselves."
When asked about Stella, architect Robert Kahn refers to Isaiah
Berlin's essay on Leo Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox." It is based
on the concept that the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows
one big thing. "Frank, like Tolstoy, is a fox," remarks Kahn of his
mentor, friend and sometime client. "While many artists pursue a
singular idea, Frank's work has consistently expanded and evolved,
according to his view at a particular moment. He is completely
unencumbered by fashion or what is popular. Frank actually
makes the moment. He captures it and helps to define it."
This was certainly true of Stella's 1958 New York debut. Fresh out of
Princeton, he came to New York and rented a former jeweler's shop on
Eldridge Street on the Lower East Side. He began using ordinary house
paint to paint symmetrical black stripes on canvas. Called the
Black Paintings, they are credited with paving the way for the
minimal art movement of the 1960s. By the fall of 1959, Dorothy Miller
of The Museum of Modern Art had chosen four of the austere pictures
for inclusion in a show called Sixteen Americans. The museum
paid $900 for one canvas entitled The Marriage of Reason and
Squalor. In 1993, the Osaka City Museum of Modern Art purchased
another Black Stella for a record $5 million.
The original asking price for a Black Painting was $75, which Stella
established himself in the summer of 1959. "Thomas Hoving [the art
historian] had been teaching at Princeton and had just been hired as a
curator by The Metropolitan Museum of Art," Stella recounts today. "He
came down to look at my paintings and sort of liked them. He pointed
to one and asked how much it would cost. I looked at the seven [feet]
by five [feet] painting, did some quick arithmetic, and said, 'Well,
$75.' He explained that he and his wife were newly married and just
moving to New York, so he'd have to discuss it with her. I thought 'Oh
boy, maybe I'll sell a painting!' The next day he called and said,
since they were just starting out they really couldn't afford a
painting like that."
Hoving has since come around. In an article in the Summer 1995 issue
of Cigar Aficionado, he declared Stella's work one of this
generation's most worthwhile art investments. Soon after Hoving's
rejection, a discouraged Stella gave the painting away to the writer
Michael Fried, thinking it couldn't be worth anything if he could not
sell it to a man of Thomas Hoving's means for a mere $75. It now hangs
in the Baltimore Museum of Art's The New Wing for Modern Art.
In the summer of 1959, Leo Castelli, the Italian-born art dealer
already showing Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, invited the
23-year-old Stella to be on his gallery's roster of cutting-edge
artists. Stella's fresh approach continued to develop. Using metallic
paint on geometrically shaped canvases, he did groups in aluminum,
copper and purple. Sticking with stripes and Benjamin Moore house
paint, he began using brighter colors for a series of Concentric
Squares and Mitered Mazes in 1962-63.
Although these are smaller in scale than his present work, and more
architectonic, Stella says, "I don't think they're that different from
what I'm working on now--the colors turn around and there are a lot of
parts moving. So it's about action and motion--it seems to be
basically the same sensibility." In his view, great painting creates
space and light. "By and large, the paintings are actually static. It
is the artist who sets it up so you can have the experience of
motion and action, space and light, in the painting. That's what art
is about." Castelli, who has represented Stella for 36 years, asserts,
"He is one of the great geniuses of our time. He is very inventive,
and that has never let up."
Also not subsiding is Stella's stream of exotic, euphonic
titles. Names like Saskatoon, Ossipee,
Quathlamba, Zinglantz and Hooloomooloo label his
pieces. He appears to have an affinity for double vowels, z's and
q's. "I guess I like the sound of them, but I like the way they look
too," he admits. Stella relies on his instincts in all aspects of his
work, perceiving each piece as an enterprise.
His compositions became curvilinear with his Protractor Series,
begun in 1967. Done in rainbow, fan and interlace patterns, they were
named after ancient circular-plan cities of the Near East such as
Ctesiphon, Hiraqla and Firuzabad. Stella
continued to experiment with round forms, putting them on square and
rectangular canvases in the Saskatchewan Series. In the 1970s,
the Polish Village paintings were named after synagogues that
had been destroyed in Poland by the Nazis. Stella then began etching
and painting brightly patterned metal reliefs known as the
Brazilian Series, Exotic Birds works and
Indian Birds works. His Cones and Pillars were metal
reliefs in those shapes with Italian titles from Italo Calvino's
Italian Folktales. Chapter titles from Moby Dick
identify a late 1980s series of mixed-media abstract constructions and
lithographs with a lot of wave imagery.
Stella names his work carefully. His own surname is Italian for star,
which somehow seems auspicious. Stella became a star by accident, not
by design. Art critics have commented that, like Picasso, he seems to
have been born in the right place at the right time.
Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, to first-generation
American parents (his paternal grandparents were Sicilian and his
maternal, Calabrian). His father, Frank, was a gynecologist in
Malden, who worked his way through medical school by painting
department store interiors. He viewed painting as an avocation, not a
career. He sent his son, Frank, the eldest of three children, to
Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, for a good education that
would prepare him for a respectable profession. There, in a studio art
program that provided students with unlimited supplies of materials
and great freedom to experiment, Frank began to paint. His father
(with whom he remained close until his death in 1979) encouraged him
to go to the college of his choice, but said the only three he would
pay for were Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Stella chose Princeton for
its proximity to the New York post-Abstract Expressionist art scene.
Upon graduating and moving to New York in 1958, Stella became friendly
with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. He and sculptor Carl
André were already friends from Princeton. Stella also struck
up friendships with the architects Richard Meier and Philip
Johnson. In the early 1960s, he met and married his first wife, the
art critic Barbara Rose, who was then a Columbia graduate
student. They had two children, Rachel and Michael. The couple
divorced in 1969. Nine years later, Stella married Harriet McGurk, a
pediatrician with whom he shares what his friends say is a strong,
stable relationship. They have two sons, Patrick and Peter.
At a dinner after the opening of a recent show of oversized paintings
(containing plenty of smoke rings), there was a round of toasts
honoring the artist. In an uncharacteristic gesture, the usually
reserved Stella spoke, paying tribute to his friend, Henry Geldzahler,
who died in 1994. Stella noted that the smoke ring imagery in his
present work would never have been conceived had Henry not introduced
him to cigars.
In the 1960s, Geldzahler, then the curator of contemporary art at The
Metropolitan Museum of Art (he would later become New York City's
Commissioner of Cultural Affairs), began sharing his Schwarz
Weisheits with Stella. "They were Brazilian cigars made in
Switzerland. The name means 'black wisdom' in German. They were only
decent cigars, but they came in a truly beautiful can," Stella
recalls. But it was art critic Clement Greenberg who converted him to
Cuban cigars. In 1965, when the sculptor David Smith died, Greenberg
gave Stella a box of Smith's leftover Don Candidos (a Cuban brand no
longer produced). Stella remembers opening the box on a train ride en
route to his parents' house in Massachusetts and smoking his first
Cuban cigar. "The aroma and the flavor was completely different from
anything I had ever tasted," he says. "It was strong and I really
liked it."
On another May morning, Stella is energetically into his work. "Today
is a real work day. I mean we're really working today...so
you'll get a good idea of what's happening here," he announces, not
mentioning that it is his 59th birthday. "They found me out!" he
exclaims when his assistants place a pop-up birthday card and three
neatly wrapped green packages on top of a long collage that he is
fastening shapes onto with a loud staple gun. He unwraps the gifts to
find 20 Nat Sherman green-and-white boxes of what Stella designates
"Nat's matches," a silver cigar cutter, and a wooden box of
Partagas. He appreciates the streamlined simplicity of the cigar
cutter. Holding it up, he studies its form and jokes, "I'll just spray
paint around it and put it into a painting."
This would come as no surprise. His use of copper paint in the
Copper Series--giant striped copper pictures shaped like T's,
L's and crosses--was an idea conceived one 1960 weekend while he
helped his father paint the bottom of a boat with barnacle-resistant
copper boat varnish. In 1976, he painted a BMW 3.0 CSL coupé
for the Le Mans race, commissioned by BMW as the second in a series of
13 Art Cars, covering the auto with a black-and-white-square grid
pattern. He painted a second BMW, an M-1, for race car driver Peter
Gregg.
He found a red, foam rubber, cutout spiral soaker hat on a beach in
Rio, gave it a twist, and used the shape to top a chapel he had
designed as one of several buildings for a cultural mall in
Dresden. (The mall was never built.) "I guess I'm influenced by art
and life," he says. "I'm interested in what I see in terms of my past
and present pictorial experience. And I'm interested in life--everyday
things."
Minutes after opening his birthday gifts, Stella reaches for his
everyday green plastic cutter to clip a cigar. "The new one's too
nice," he demurs when asked why he's not using it. This is puzzling,
coming from a car racing fan who owned three Ferraris over a period of
time. (He now drives a Subaru Legacy.)
Stella's personal tastes run the gamut, from the ordinary to the
grandiose. On his birthday, he wears aged, rolled-up blue jeans, a
black fleece front-zippered vest embossed with a Stratton Mountain
insignia, over a fading plaid flannel shirt, and gray New Balance
running shoes. His large glasses with smoke-colored frames are
attached to a sports leash decorated with splatters of Pollockesque
paint driplets in Stellalike Day-Glo colors. Stella likes simple food,
and the studio fridge is stocked with bottles of Pepsi. Once an avid
squash player, Stella had his friend, architect Robert Kahn, design
and build him a court at his upstate New York farm, where he breeds
race horses. Nevertheless, his house on the property is homey and
unpretentious.
The artist's appetite for both the common and sublime also applies to
cigars: "I smoke whatever I can, whenever I can get it. I like Punch
and an ordinary corona, or half a corona. I love Cuban cigars, and I
suppose the fact that it's contraband gives it that edge that makes it
glamorous and sort of wonderful. And it gives you something to do in
foreign countries," he quips. A patron of great cigar stores, on each
trip to London he visits tobacconist J.J. Fox and Robert Lewis. His
assistants from Toronto come to New York bearing Montecristos. Stella
likens his cigar habit to a security blanket. Handling them is as
pleasurable as smoking, and he always has one around, not necessarily
lit.
Just as smoking has informed his recent work, so has past art. He
loves sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian painting,
particularly that of Michelangelo and Caravaggio. "There's no question
that the human figure is a powerful, powerful tool in drawing the
viewer into a painting. And it's not certain that abstract forms have
an equivalent to the human body," he muses. "If you painted a painting
with a woman and a red triangle on the canvas, people would be more
moved by the woman than by the triangle. On the other hand, it's
possible they'd read more into the triangle than the woman. So with
the abstract form you have a chance at a more open-ended kind of
expression."
Stella has always been an abstractionist. He says he never was good at
producing realistic illustrations of what he saw. "The forms that you
make, whether they be abstract or representational, perform in such a
way in the pictorial arena as to give you an effect you couldn't get
any other way. Your vision or your experience of life is different
from the experience that you have in front of paintings," he
continues. Stella was influenced by the paintings of post-war Abstract
Expressionists such as Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, Willem de
Kooning and Franz Kline. "What you see in a painting is what you don't
see anywhere else," he says. "It's an apprehension of the world put
before your vision that can only happen in a painting."
Stella's otherwise precise and eloquent speech is punctuated with
mundane expressions like "stuff," "sort of" and "pretty good" as well
as some '60s terms like "far out." "Really" is used for emphasis. When
discussing his projects, he almost always uses "we," implicitly
acknowledging the input of his several assistants and
collaborators. Described in the media as shy, aloof and antisocial,
he's not big on small talk. But those close to Stella characterize him
as generous and kind.
At five feet seven inches tall, Stella's small stature is apparent
only in comparison to the huge pictures he is working on. Although he
exudes an enormous amount of mental energy, his low-key outward manner
contrasts with the jarring color, nonstop motion, cutting-edge
materials and the general daring of his work. The speed in his art
perhaps relates to his passion for racing. "I like the action of
competitive events. Racing is a fairly primitive idea: to go faster
and faster. The object is to start here and see who gets to the finish
line first. That's not sophisticated, but it has a kind of beauty to
it. When it's over it's simple. It's quantifiable--exactly the
opposite of art."
"In the art world, people don't talk about winning; they talk about
what's better," Stella says. Few artists have done better than
Stella. His work continues to fetch record prices. Art dealers vie for
the privilege of showing and selling it. New York's Museum of Modern
Art has mounted two major Stella expositions, in 1970 and 1987. Most
every contemporary art museum in the world boasts at least one Stella
in its permanent collection. This month, a complete retrospective of
the artist's work opens at Madrid's Museo Nacional Centro de Arte
Reina Sofia; it then travels to Munich's Haus Der Kunst in January.
Large-scale pieces of Stella's work grace corporate spaces around the
globe, including Saatchi & Saatchi's New York lobby and the
outside wall of Pacific Bell in Los Angeles. In 1983, Harvard named
him Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry, an honor previously
bestowed on Igor Stravinsky and T.S. Eliot. He has also been a
visiting critic at Yale.
His father would be proud. Yet Stella continues to struggle. "It's as
hard for me now as it ever was," he confides. When asked what he would
like to accomplish, Stella responds without hesitation: "I'd like to
build one building. We've had some pretty good concepts for
architecture and I'd like to carry them through to see if they'd be
buildable and habitable. You need to test your ideas."
Nancy Wolfson is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.
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