Frank Stella - Sense Quotes

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[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
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
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
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