Frank Stella

Blinded by the light

- Gwynned vitello

“ONE LEARNS ABOUT PAINTING BY LOOKING AT AND IMITATING other painters. I can’t stress enough how important it is, if you are interested at all in painting, to look, and to look a great deal, at painting. There is no other way to find out about painting.” Excerpted from the artist’s 1960 lecture at Pratt Institute, this simple dictum personifies Frank Stella: deep, direct, and ready to work. Although Juxtapoz is purportedly rooted in the so-called lowbrow or no-brow movement, it has always showcased the cutting edge. Meaning, whether or not the art is emerging, what we serve is en pointe. Like the brightest stars, Frank Stella goes way back, but continues to beam a brilliant light. We flipped through the pages of our magazine and identified several artists who had clearly taken his advice to heart and hand. It’s a pleasure to share their observations along with the work of this artist, whose retrospective travels from the Whitney Museum of American Art to San Francisco’s de Young Museum.

Bill Saylor 

I used to walk by Frank Stella's studio on 13th Street in the ’90s a lot. It was in a beautiful, historic building once used for selling horses and carriages, and through the window, you could always see part of some giant project hanging from a beam on the ceiling, most likely one of his wall assemblages, which were huge, dense and layered. You could see these works around town in the lobbies of big buildings like some abnormal cell growth from the architecture itself.

At the time, I was working for Julian Schnabel and was more in his camp, as well as Polke, Beuys and Oehlen when it came to making things, but one day I did buy a copy of Stella's book, Working Space, which was based on some lectures he gave at Harvard in the 1960s.