Frank Stella - Art Quotes

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When people still talk about art that I made in the 60s— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!

Frank Stella
Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.

Frank Stella
[reacting in the artist-talk on Donald Judd who emphasis the 'whole' of an art work] But we're still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren't any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don't think our work that radical in any sense because you don't find any really new compositional or structural element. I don't know if that exists. It's like the idea of the color you haven't seen before. Does something exist that's as radical as a diagonal that's not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can't describe?

Frank Stella
I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.

Frank Stella
On a question about 'gesture' panting:
I think I had been badly affected by.... the romance of Abstract Expressionism... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously.. I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.

Frank Stella
Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.

Frank Stella
When Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody [like in 'Art News', by Tom Hess] dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case... In every sense his instincts were Abstract Expressionist, and he was terribly involved with all of that, but he felt he had to move, too.

Frank Stella
Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.

Frank Stella
You are always related [as an artist] to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can't think of anything I like less.... the 'Groupe de recherché d'Art visuel' actually painted all the patterns before I did – all the basic designs that are in my painting – I didn't even know about it.... it still doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting – sort of post Ma Bill school – a kind of curiosity, very dreary.

Frank Stella
They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.

Frank Stella
The aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.

Frank Stella