Nothing if Not Obsessed: The Prints of Frank Stella

"Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later." - Frank Stella

The renowned American painter/printmaker, Frank Stella, was born in in 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts. After he graduated from  Princeton University in 1958 with a degree in History, Stella moved to New York City and eventually set up a studio in Manhattan. He was deeply influenced by the Abstract Expressionism movement and particularly liked the work of painters Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. He looked at the flat, single band of color of Barnet Newman’s enormous paintings and also responded to Jasper Johns’ ‘Target’ mixed media pieces.

Stella is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the of 20^th c. (60s and 70s) for his flat, geometric paintings about ‘nothing’. Yeah, right. Nothing but an obsession with detail, depth, color, texture, and life.   He set into motion a bold new art movement formulated upon a literal ‘what you see is what you see’ concept. He abandoned pictorial references and indulged in metallic paint and geometric-shaped canvases. The public didn’t know what to make of his work at first, but they had been over-saturated with the emotionalism attached with Abstract Expressionism. This new Minimalism movement wasn’t a walk in the park for the average person, but at least it was predictable in its geometric principles and regularity. For him, he preferred that the picture function as an object rather than it representing a person, place or thing.

Stella’s paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at Oberlin College’s  Allen Memorial Art Museum, and in the Museum of Modern Art’s "Sixteen Americans”. Stella became one of famed art dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists and in 1960 he began to use metallic paint and pinstripe lines to make his work. Eventually, Stella worked with letters as a shaped canvas, and then expanded that idea to include shaped canvases in concentric circles laminated on 3D wooden constructions. His colors grew more varied, and the physical shift toward the tactile surface grew more verbose.

Similarly, Stella’s approach to printmaking was just as exploratory. He began working with Master Printer Ken Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. in the mid-60s and together they came up with the then inconceivable idea to blend and mix printmaking processes.  They incorporated lithography, offset lithography, silkscreen, etching and relief,  and as the critics say, the rest is history.





I recall my first exposure to Stella’s mixed media prints at an Art Expo in Chicago in the late 1980s. As is often the case when one walks through those endless corridors displaying a cattle-call of galleries, the eyes begin to glaze and visual overload begins to set in. I turned a corner and stopped dead in my tracks before one of Stella’s six foot tall prints. I remember the vivid green and densely layered paper. Man, it had so many layers of ink (52, in fact) the thing looked like you could stand it up in a corner like an old pair of unwashed jeans. It was just fantastic, stunning to look at, and it certainly looked like no print I’d ever seen before. I promptly asked the gallery rep what it cost – as if I could afford something like that as a student. The price while high wasn’t out of reach if I wanted to sell my car and hope there was enough left over to get myself on a train back to school. You get the gist. The bug had bitten me and the die was cast. If someone could do that with a print, well there were more that had to be made.

These works were so incredible for their technical virtuosity, one understand why Stella needed to go to a printer to help him make those things. Remember, this became the era of printer-artist collaborations, and prints were flooding the art markets. An artist could make a series of prints and sell them for a fraction of the cost of a painting or sculpture. Artists recognized in those other media went, sometime at the behest of their gallery dealer, to collaborate on a print project. Fortunately, it turned a tide and from this group of artists unfamiliar with the printmaking process, many of them came to love printmaking and continued making significant prints through the next 20 years. It reinvigorated the medium and the experimental print was born.

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella branched away from his Protractor series and created a large body of work  that was loosely inspired by  Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.  He began to call for a rejuvenated abstraction, by searching the depths of Caravaggio’s Baroque-era paintings for his inspiration. 

The result was that Stella’s paintings and prints became more wildly engaged in color and gestural strokes of color and etched surfaces. He librated traditional printmakers from the confines of a plate, stone or a silk screen. His images burst out from the paper and pulled the viewer into his compositions like a Newman or Pollock painting. Stella’s work, like Helen Frankenthaler’s, expanded the medium to do something new, and whether one likes his ‘subject matter’ or not, we must express our gratitude.

Finally, Stella’s art has been seen worldwide in several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. He continues to live and work in New York where he also remains active working with the Artists Rights Society which is committed to protecting the rights of artists. 

Awards:

1965 - Solomon Guggenheim’s ‘The Shaped Canvas’, and their 1966’s ‘Systemic Painting’

1970 – A retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, making him the youngest artist ever to receive one.

1984 - Charles Eliot Norton lectures(6) at Harvard University

2009 - National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama



*Stella pictured at right working on one of his Moby Dick inspired prints.

Karen Kunc: The Cornucopian Printmaker

In the late 1970s, Karen Kunc came on the printmaking horizon like a blazing fireball, and she continues to blaze a trail in American printmaking. Since she earned her Masters degree from Ohio State University, eventually making her way back to teach in her native Nebraska at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Go Huskers!), she has helped assure a prominence to their already fine printmaking program.

What originally fascinated people with Kunc’s work, and continues to amaze them today,  is not only their enormity of scale, but the color, funk and complexity of her imagery visually connect her prints with other media – the upshot is Kunc’s works don’t necessarily look like prints. They cross over to something more painterly, and if someone weren’t informed about the methodology and look of prints, one could assume they were paintings. What is especially notable about this is that many artists have bridged into printmaking from their respective art fields and made wonderful prints like Helen Frankenthaler and Frank Stella. In this regard, Kunc helps advance the field and our colleagues on a par where prints are seen for the fantastic images they are, not being judged by elitist attitudes as a step-child to more 'serious' artistic endeavors.

Kunc’ painterly approach swings joyously to the other side of the art/print pendulum where her work breaks away from the flat, grained look of a traditional woodcut. There are references to landscape and what one would find living in Nebraska - the wide open ranges and amazing daily cumulus displays. But there is also an observance of Nature in its natural erosion and decay. Kunc' color selections don't necessarily call those natural observations to mind when we see her prints, but the formal elements are there. Still,  she is able to do something pretty special with a piece of wood and some carving tools. 

Additionally, she brings vibrant color to her work that is well above the register usually seen in this genre, and her ambitiously layered cornucopian feast makes us forget the labored journey she makes in creating these final images. Her production level is equally ambitious, including her eloquent handmade books and mixed media work. 

There is an organic quality to Kunc’s work, a joie de vivre. Some of her visual kinships are seen with painters like Georgia O’Keefe’s clouds, and the way Terry Winters shifts through his organic layers, but Kunc’ connections are more directly aligned to the late, great Elizabeth Murray. They share a fascination with color and surface, and if Kunc chose to work in 3D then their symbiotic sisterhood would be complete.

Here is an artist working at peak form, and it is certain students able to study and work with Kunc will only gain from the experience. Side note*I remember seeing Kunc years ago at one of the Drake Printmaking Symposium workshops in Des Moines. She came in and while she was getting prepped to work, she opened up this incredible, beautifully crafted case filled with custom made brayers from Europe. People’s jaws just dropped in awe. The tools’ craftsmanship was exquisite. While some say it’s the tools that make an artist work on a higher level, we all know that isn’t always true, but who among us wouldn’t love to have access to exceptional tools and paper with which to make our work? 

Kunc surely knows her craft and makes extraordinary prints. Our excitement is partly in anticipation of what she will next create, for the delight of seeing her work is like a savoring a fine dessert, or a bottle of Merlot. The work sings on different levels of satiation, and we are blessed to sample the abundance she shares with us. 

For more information about Kunc' work, go visit  www.karen-kunc.com/ and see an excerpt from her own statement about her work below.

“My work as an artist/printmaker addresses issues of the landscape and our natural surroundings as direct influences from my Nebraska heritage, my daily experiences and viewpoints in the landscape of the plains and from extensive travel, and as artistic interpretation and contemplation on larger issues of the eternal life struggle, of endurance and vulnerability, growth and destruction.

I am interested in the span of time it takes to wear away a canyon, build a mountain, the erosion forces that continually wash onto the plains, forming the earth, and, ultimately, shaping our world... from nature and science, spiritual and religious thought, art historical and modern icons, immigration narratives and native myths.”

Helen Frankenthaler's Prints Expand the Medium

Several newspapers have noted the recent passing of American artist Helen Frankenthaler, and her contributions in the field of 20^th c. painting. While her accolades in that area are numerous; having received recognition by way of dozens of honorary doctoral degrees, being a presidential appointee to the National Council on the Arts and a recipient of the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2002, her accolades in printmaking have yet to be adequately praised.  I will begin by acknowledging Frankenthaler’s artistic beginnings and proceed to look at some of her prints, which are nothing short of spectacular.

Helen Frankenthaler was born the third of three daughters to a wealthy New York family. She was educated at the Dalton School studying under Rufino Tamayo, and at Bennington College in Vermont.  She later studied with the effervescent Hans Hofmann, whose advocacy of a ‘push-pull’ methodology lead to the Abstract Expressionist movement.

In her mid-twenties, her now famous ‘pour and stain’ approach to painting gained the attention of critic Clement Greenberg, and she was proclaimed the ‘bridge’ between the artists working in Abstract Expressionism to the Color Field Painters. She was included in a show about Post-Painterly Abstraction and the moniker stuck. Her personal relationship with Greenberg, and later marriage to Ab Ex painter/writer Robert Motherwell, propelled Frankenthaler into the midst of two male-dominant art movements, where she became friends with artists David Smith, Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock and Willem and Elaine de Kooning.

Frankenthaler, along with fellow painters Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, Lee Krasner, and Elaine deKooning made their work, and rebuffed the idea of feminism, or being recognized for their sex over their artwork. They saw themselves as artists and the equal of their male peers. She said,"I had something to say in terms of painting and went about doing it.... What has made it work, or what makes certain paintings successful or not, has to do with my being a painter and a thinking, feeling person, more than my sex, color, height, origin." 

It wasn’t until 1961 that Frankenthaler made her first print, but in the 1970s, she began to gain recognition for her printmaking. She went to Japan and studied traditional woodblock techniques where she produced a body of work inspired by the 11^th c. "The Tale of Genji" series.

She became known as an innovative printmaker. Her inventive lithographs, etchings and screen prints resembled her paintings, but most people agree it was her woodblock prints that opened new doors for her creatively. They possessed a fresh approach, both in color and in scale.  She was able to produce a level of nuanced color and line rarely seen previously in a medium not known (at least not in the West) for its subtlety. Through her woodblocks and experimental prints,  like 1974's "Savage Breeze", she helped re-open the door to printmaking at a time when it had been suffering from lack of interest, and inspired other artists to re-explore that medium.

Frankenthaler went to make prints at ULAE at the invitation of Tatanya Grossman. She took to it like a duck to water and felt the experience liberated her. She also worked with Ken Tyler at Tyler Graphics in upstate New York, and by the time of her death had produced over 150 editioned prints and over two hundred monotype/mixed media works.

“East and Beyond” was Frankenthaler’s first foray into making the grainy, unforgiving wood block receptive to her own sense of vibrant, though translucent, color and organic forms. Her composition was so open compared with traditional woodblock techniques that it has had a deep influence on the medium ever since. It would eventually become known to the development of contemporary printmaking what “Mountains and Sea” had been to the development of Color Field painting.

“Essence Mulbery” (as seen above) is one of the first Frankenthaler prints I remember seeing. I was taken immediately by its subtle, multi-layered colors and what I’ll term ‘respect’ for the surface of the matrix and the feel of the paper on which it is printed . She understood how to work with the grain of the wood to make her images, and though she went onto other printmaking methods, her woodblocks remain my personal favorites. I saw, and still see in them, an extension pathway of her colorful field paintings. One also sees here a reference to Rothko’s own search for color field abstractions is felt in this work, (though he and some of the other Ab Ex painters ran their course and found nothing else to pursue or no new bridge to cross, thus ending their careers and their lives too soon.)

Frankenthaler’s prints eventually bridged the gap between her flowing painting style and her interested in the linear woodblocks. For that reason, I am showing one of her later prints and one of the woodblocks used to create it. The block itself is a work of art, with its delicate cuts and residual stains of color imbedded into the woodblock’s surface. Truly the woman understood the medium as a master should.

Critics weren’t always in agreement with Frankenthaler’s influence on 20^th c. art, saying her later paintings didn’t have a certain weight as did her earlier works; that they ventured in to a marginal, pretty coloring phase, speaking of nothing in particular. Their short-sighted observations proclaim the difficulty an artist often has in maintaining the art world’s, or the critic’s, attention once their ‘true moment’ has passed onto successive movements. Artists mature and evolve, which sometimes goes against the forays of the art critic to find the next ‘thing’ that will transform a vision for future artists and movements.

Frankenthaler understood the changes of nature, and the art world. She was substantive and tough when the situation called for it, and in touch with the intuitive nature of color, and of what it means to be ‘human’ within those color-filled environments. Her prints stand alone as an inspiration for artists and printmakers, and her contribution to the medium cannot be questioned or underestimated.

Katie Christiansen's Abstract Lyricism at the MAPC show

Imagine oneself out in Nature, out in the wilderness. What does one hear, see, smell, taste, or feel? The sensory engagement one experiences when one is out of doors is essentially abstract. One cannot control the 'elements' of the outdoors and the chance happenings that naturally occur. It is something outside the realm of our conscious minds' activities and the things we do to direct our own paths in the course of a day. Really, aren't we such egotists to think we can control all that we survey?

One immediately realizes upon contact with Katie Christiansen's prints, that the thing-ness and activities of our daily existence, and meetings, and schlepping kids to school, etc, all of it fades away. The concrete clarity of deadlines, getting to a job, and bill-paying, aren't what matter. Those may seem, and in fact are, important for some aspects our lives, but truly they are non-essentials.

The lyricism and multi-layered-ness of Christiansen's work grabs the viewer. Its sweeping scale is impactful; as like witnessing a Helen Frankenthaler color field painting for the first time. Christiansen shows off to excellent effect her ability to weave translucent color and brushstroke, integrating them like a breath of air passing over mountain ranges. Her repetition of circles remind me of  Arthur Dove's penchant for creating sound waves, although in this instance I hear birds sing as they migrate across the sky. Christiansen's current sojourn in the wide open spaces of Wyoming may have something to do with this sensibility for Nature. Her inspiration may lie elsewhere, but this work is a welcome relief from the anticipated literal-ness of other printed art. It brings full-circle the idea that printed art isn't relegated to a specific imagery - it can look like a drawing, painting, sculpture, or nothing at all.Regardless, I also enjoy this piece at the Mid America Print show because it is open and available for the public to see it - really see it, without constraint of traditional mat or glass to protect it. It is vulnerable, and therefore more viewer tactile-friendly.

I will confess a preference for this open interpretation of imagery, since my own roots stem from Abstract Expressionism, but I sense she understands it, too. Christiansen's work nourishes our soul, and I, for one, will gladly continue to feast upon it.