Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Buchloh-Painting As Diagram-Five Notes On Frank Stella'sEarly Paintings, 1958-1959 PDF
Buchloh-Painting As Diagram-Five Notes On Frank Stella'sEarly Paintings, 1958-1959 PDF
BENJAMIN H. D. BUCHLOH
1. The Diagram
In a famous radio conversation between Frank Stella, Donald Judd, and Bruce
Glaser in 1964, Stella made a rather surprising and suddenly aggressive remark.1 It
might have been partially triggered by an earlier comment that Robert Rosenblum
had made when reviewing an exhibition of Stella’s Black Paintings in which he had
referred to them as “diagrams.”2 Stella stated: “A diagram is not a painting; it’s as
simple as that. I can make a painting from a diagram, but can you?”
This remark allows us to instantly address one of the key questions that
Stella’s work from the moment of 1958–59 seems to pose: What type or variation
of abstraction had been invented by Stella at that time, and how does it relate to
the infinitely complex network of positions in abstraction found in both prewar
and postwar painterly culture? In fact, one of the primary difficulties historians
have faced has been precisely one of differentiating Stella’s work from both the
abstraction of the historical avant-garde and—even more so—the principles of
* This essay was delivered at the conference on the early work of Frank Stella at Harvard
University, April 8, 2006, organized by Harry Cooper and Megan Luke. At the time, the lecture was
met with considerable consternation, not to say aggression, which kept me from publishing it.
Following the counsel of my friends and colleagues at October, I have now agreed to publish it in
unchanged and unedited form as a contribution to what seems to be an overdue reevaluation of
Stella’s fundamentally important early work.
1. Bruce Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” in Gregory Battcock, ed., Minimal Art: A Critical
Anthology (New York: Dutton, 1968), pp. 156–167.
2. Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 56.
OCTOBER 143, Winter 2013, pp. 126–144. © 2013 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
128 OCTOBER
modernist abstract ion governing New York paint ing since the Abstract
Expressionists, especially concerning the legacies of Barnett Newman and Ad
Reinhardt. Already in 1949–50, one could encounter a multiplicity of operations
performing acts of aesthetic withdrawal and negation by redeploying conventions
of nonrepresentational painting in the most unorthodox and for the longest time
illegible way.
In a 1965 catalogue essay for the exhibition “Three American Painters” at
the Fogg Art Museum, Michael Fried suggested that Stella’s work had emerged
from a dialogue with the key figures of Abstract Expressionism3—it was not until
1970, with William Rubin’s 1970 monographic catalogue on the artist, that the
degree to which Stella had also been in dialogue with the paintings of Jasper
Johns became clear.4 But if Stella’s practice was entangled with and suspended
between the contradictory positions in the work of his predecessors, his presenta-
tion of the Black Paintings in 1959 constituted a decisive break, an assault on the
formalist traditions of New York School modernism.
Stella’s remark about the diagram introduces a key term that points to the
artist’s paradoxical conception of authorial identity. This will become all the more
evident when we consider the impact of Stella’s diagrammatic conception of the
work on his Minimalist followers, especially, perhaps, Carl Andre. On the one
hand, the statement asserts Stella’s continuing confidence in artistic authorship,
not to say originality (one would only have to think of statements and works made
by Andy Warhol at the same time, or statements made by Dan Flavin slightly later,
about the universal availability of artistic means and concepts of production to
recognize the underlying conservative agenda in Stella’s statement). After all, the
statement stresses the uncontested primacy of painting as artistic practice (a posi-
tion that Stella would voice again and again, often even disparaging the shift from
painting to sculpture in the work of the Minimalists, and always belittling his own
occasional attempts at sculpture at that time). Yet it also forces us to recognize that
Stella’s abstractions—unlike the Black Paintings by Rauschenberg, on the one
hand, and Reinhardt, on the other—would be the only ones that could in fact be
rightfully called “diagrammatic” since they are actually enforcing a given spatial
and linear symmetrical schema that rigorously displaces all claims and pretenses
to compositional decision-making processes or authorial intentions.
Rather than seeing Stella’s abstraction as the culmination of modernist
painting because of its medium-specificity, self-reflexivity, and opticality and its
engagement with the strategies of painting as shape and deductive structure—the
position for which Michael Fried has argued so powerfully again and again—I
want to suggest that the order of the diagram as a readymade formal organization
of linear and spatial components might be the proper episteme to demarcate one
3. Michael Fried. Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge,
MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1965).
4. William Rubin, Frank Stella (New York: the Museum of Modern Art, 1970).
Painting as Diagram 129
which Stella’s paintings were initially compared on several occasions, clearly exem-
plify a type of abstraction whose inner logic and spatial organization aim at a
dialectics of oppositions and sublation, a model of spatial expansion, and the embod-
iment of a universal abolition of hierarchical social relations, to name but a few of
the most obvious and crucial parameters that the Checkerboards invoke. By this
description alone it is obvious that a comparison between Mondrian and Stella is
ultimately nonsensical, since Mondrian’s paintings obviously do not conform to the
definition of the diagram as a purely quantitative order or as a schema of registration
and data collection. Even less do Mondrian’s Checkerboards qualify to be aligned
with an episteme of order and control, let alone with one of overdetermined confine-
ment and spatial restriction. The latter description, however, would seem to be quite
appropriate for a first diagnostic identification of the features of Stella’s paintings,
once one has overcome the predominance of the formalist terminology.
Thus, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Leo Steinberg’s definition of the flatbed
picture clearly contains elements that could easily be transferred from his discussion
of Rauschenberg’s and Johns’s work to that of Stella in 1958 when he says,
The flatbed picture makes its symbolic allusion to . . . charts, bulletin
boards, any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which
data is entered, on which information may be received, printed,
impressed—whether coherently or in confusion. The pictures of the
last fifteen to twenty years insist on a radically new orientation in which
the painted surface is no longer the analogue of a visual experience of
nature, but of operational processes.5
2. The Striations
Stella’s work prior to the Black Paintings is defined by the almost total and
systematic abolition of planar chromatic forms in the manner of Rothko, for
example, whom Stella apparently admired early on, or of Reinhardt, who repre-
sented for Stella, along with Barnett Newman and Pollock, one of the foundations
of postwar American abstraction. Stella had acquired a Black Painting by
Reinhardt upon the completion of his own series of Black Paintings in 1960, and
in 1967, on the occasion of Reinhardt’s death, he said: “He can’t play the game
anymore, but nobody can get around the paintings anymore either. If you don't
know what they’re about you don’t know what painting is about.”6
In “Three American Painters,” Michael Fried argues that it was the discovery
of the singularity of linear forms in Newman that inspired Stella’s strategy of divid-
ing a painting into a system of more or less regular striations, thereby defining the
picture surface by an accumulation of parallel bands. By contrast, William Rubin
and others argued that Stella had not actually encountered any work by Newman
5. Leo Steinberg, “Other Criteria,” in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth Century Art
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 79.
6. Stella’s obituary note from the October 1967 Arts Canada, quoted in Lucy Lippard, Ad
Reinhardt (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981), p. 197, note 2.
Painting as Diagram 131
before Newman’s exhibition at French & Co. in 1959, but that he had not only
seen reproductions of the work of Jasper Johns as early as 1957, but, more impor-
tant, had visited Johns’s first exhibition at Leo Castelli in 1958, where he would
have seen all of Johns’s key works from 1954 onwards.
While there can be no doubt about the absolute importance to Stella of his
discovery of Johns, it is astonishing to see that the presence and impact of
Rauschenberg (whom Stella met as early as 1957 and whose work—a Black
Painting—he also acquired) have disappeared almost entirely from the discussion
of Stella’s formation (he is mentioned once in passing in Fried’s magisterial essay,
not at all in Rubin’s monograph, and only makes a passing appearance thirty years
later in the Fogg catalogue on Stella’s early work).7
It seems obvious from a comparison of Stella’s early 1958 paintings and a
painting such as Rauschenberg’s Yoicks (1953) that several key questions concern-
ing both color and compositional organization were already fully established in
Rauschenberg’s work and that they could have had an impact on Stella similar to
the tremendous shock triggered by his discovery of Johns’s Flag (1954–55). It is
very likely that Stella saw Yoicks along with Rauschenberg’s Red Paintings and the
first Combines when they were shown together at the Egan Gallery in 1954, but
questions of influence are not my concern here. What I am interested in are the
7. Harry Cooper and Megan Luke, Frank Stella 1958 (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum,
Harvard University, 2006).
132 OCTOBER
formal shifts and procedural licenses that paintings such as Yoicks offered to
Stella’s early work.
Rauschenberg’s linear painting and cumulative composition provide the
most dramatic evidence of the way in which he and Johns systematically emptied
out that which had been regarded in Abstract Expressionism as the most sacred
site of the subject’s articulation: painterly gesture and the ductus of the brushwork.
Both produced that peculiar type of linear formation that bordered on the trav-
esty of gesture, hovering near random mechanicity, and displayed an ostentatious
diffidence with regard to the manual execution of painting, negating skill just as
much as expressivity.
At the same time, the more or less regularized stacking of randomly executed
striations betrayed an indifference to traditional compositional demands. These
would also become, as I will argue, the primary characteristics of Stella’s composi-
tional striations in the early paintings of 1958 (that is, before the linear formations
would become systematized and fully regularized in the diagrams of the Black
Paintings, and before they would be forged into a symmetrical scheme that would
prohibit even the last residual compositional decision or slightest deviation).
But it should also be mentioned immediately that the very schema of a
merely striational accumulation of linear marks traversing the entire picture
plane will not only emerge as one of Stella’s early key pictorial strategies, it will
simultaneously become the matrix of the work of Robert Ryman, Stella’s counter-
figure and great historical complement, ignored or simply written out of that
historical moment by Fried and Rubin in their formalist criticism.
The exclusion of Ryman from Rubin’s and Fried’s modernist formalism
probably resulted not only from the difficulty of seeing his work in Greenbergian
terms but also, and perhaps more so, from their inability to see that Ryman, very
similarly to Stella, had actually achieved a synthesis of modernist abstraction and
Duchampian theories of the readymade that had previously only been established
by Johns and Rauschenberg.
It is this kind of exact duplication of newly emerging pictorial strategies that
allows us to identify what could possibly motivate the structure of striation as the
principal formal organization in Stella’s work after Rauschenberg and Johns.
Stella’s Coney Island, along with Blue Horizon and Astoria, undoubtedly some of the
key paintings prior to the Black Paintings and all from 1958, give us the opportu-
nity to clarify the comparison. First of all, on the level of ductus and painterly
execution, Stella both regularizes and steadily works at detaching the striations
134 OCTOBER
3. Color Loss
A final, sometimes decisive, withdrawal of color from postwar painting is of
course to be found in both American and European work of the 1950s and ’60s: in
Newman, for example; Johns’s white and Piero Manzoni’s achromatic paintings;
and in Stella’s shift to the Black Paintings, which are distinctly achromatic. Stella
had repeatedly emphasized during the first reception of his Black Paintings that
he did not want these paintings to be perceived as “black” paintings, but as paint-
ings painted with the non-color black.
To recognize the full spectrum of these extreme reductions or total with-
drawals of color after 1945 is in many ways crucial to an understanding of Stella’s
commitment to black in 1959. Each of these artists had of course rather different
motivations for their epuration of the chromatic. Their engagement with the
monochrome or the achrome pronounced different histor ical inflect ions.
Nevertheless, they are contextually linked (by, if nothing else, their shared contes-
tation of color, the absolute necessity of denaturing the painting, and by their
shared strategies of depleting and homogenizing the painterly surface in favor of
a unified tone and hue). They also invite comparisons with the work of at least
some of the key figures (e.g., Newman and Johns) in bringing about the same
oppositions of color/non-color, even if in extremely different terms. The dialecti-
Painting as Diagram 135
8. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), in Michael Jennings et al., eds.,
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, vol. 2, part 2: 1931–1934 (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA,.
2005), p. 518.
136 OCTOBER
and overall provocative callousness that the artist seems to have been known for at
the time. But Rubin immediately accompanies those brief comments with the firm
and prohibitive caveat that Stella “would be horrified at the idea that the viewer
might use them as a springboard to content.” Tellingly, the title that Rubin omits
altogether is clearly the most stunning and provocative reference altogether: Arbeit
Macht Frei, the infamous inscription over the gate to the Nazi death camp at
Auschwitz Birkenau.
Six years later, in an essential catalogue devoted entirely to the Black
Paintings, Brenda Richardson provided the most exhaustive information on the
titles and their historical references. But in her overall argument, she attempts to
convey the sense that in overarching mood and subject matter, the Black Paintings
merely concern generic “disasters.” And these disasters, according to Richardson,
just inexplicably happened to range from the Nazi Holocaust to crime-ridden
African-American New York neighborhoods, from drug and jazz clubs (e.g., Club
Onyx) to the tragic girlfriends sometimes encountered in these clubs (i.e., Jill).9
Perhaps not surprisingly, art historians in Germany, where Stella has enjoyed
an amazingly strong reception history and remains a central artistic figure for a
number of the formalist art historians there, pass over the implications of these
titles altogether. They seem to follow all too gladly Rubin’s lead, granting Stella an
exemption from the burdens of historical reference by diagnosing his decision to
use these titles as mere pranksterism and insisting on withdrawing the artist’s
titles from any interpretive account: neither Gottfried Boehm in his essay on the
Black Paintings in 1977 nor Gudrun Inboden or Johannes Meinhardt in their
essays of 1989 pay any attention whatsoever to the three Nazi titles in particular or
the titles of the Black series in general.
This non-reaction confirms what Stella himself must have sensed when rup-
turing the repressive coating of modernist painting in 1958. Namely, that the
history of modernist abstraction would eventually be associated with an actual
memory of what was then the still-recent totalitarian destruction of bourgeois sub-
jectivity, and that abstraction would have to be probed in terms of its participation
in a history of the disavowal and repression of that destruction.
Or, as Jaleh Mansoor aptly phrases it in her discussion of Piero Manzoni’s
work: postwar monochromes and their diagrammatic compositional matrices
articulate “the irrationality folded within modernist rationality, the gulag in the
modernist grid.”10 Thus, I would like to advance an admittedly speculative argu-
ment to complicate the matter and, if nothing else, to at least attempt to rupture
the repressive silence around the titles of Stella’s Black Paintings.
It is clear that Stella wishes to position Die Fahne Hoch in a dialogic relation-
ship with Johns’s American Flags, be they red, white, and blue or monochrome
9. Brenda Richardson, Frank Stella: The Black Paintings (Baltimore MD: the Baltimore Museum
of Art, 1976).
10. Jaleh Mansoor, “Piero Manzoni: ‘We Want to Organize Disintegration,’” in October 95 (Winter
2001), pp. 28–53.
Painting as Diagram 137
white. And we are not suggesting that the dialogic relationship between Stella’s
“flag” and Johns’s Flag would be any less complex or differentiated than had
been the relat ionship bet ween Johns’s st ar s and str ipes and the Abstract
Expressionist demands for the Americanness of American painting. This had
clearly been one facet of the spectrum along which Johns positioned himself
with infinite precision at the outset of his artistic project in response to the con-
cepts of a mythical identity and virility of American art at the time. And in
order to position his work, and himself as a gay subject, he had to perform a
number of maneuvers, both manifest and clandestine, to make the work res-
onate in the full multiplicity of its subversive intentions.
Another comparison between these two generations thus suggests itself:
what if we consider Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch as operating in a manner similar to the
way that Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing had related in 1953 to the mas-
ter of Abstract Expressionism? Are these dialogic interactions between artistic
generations not performing precisely the infinitely complex process of what we
would call classic cases of good artistic oedipality and necessary symbolic parri-
cide? Or, in terms of histor y rather than of psycho -histor y, are they not
performing a proper Hegelian project of continuous progress through negation
mation of what had been once the emancipatory promises of the modernist grid
and of monochrome paint ing into carceral diagrammat ic structures. The
repressed dark underside of the modernist grid and of monochromy returns now
as an episteme of confinement and control, and the inscription of the spatial sym-
metr y and ornament al order now operate within a reduct ivist space of
symmetrical overdetermination. After all, these are the features that distinguish
the diagram from all other epistemes of abstraction (the musical, the linguistic,
the biomorphic, the geometrical, the stereometrical, the mechanomorphic) in
that the diagram (like the readymade) explicitly acknowledges the ruling condi-
t ions of external control and product ion as anter ior and super ior to the
subjectivist aesthetic intention of artistic authorship.
Johns’s very subtle and complex set of operations in terms of color applica-
tion—carefully described once by Rosalind Krauss in regard to the White Flag
(1955) as one in which “color appears as if sandwiched between a coagulated
ground of newspaper strips on the one hand and the waxy surface of encaustic on
the other . . . ”11—would now be reversed by Stella on all accounts.
First of all, with his return to the non-color black, Johns had already aptly
positioned himself in the achromatic reductions to white and gray.
Second, leaving texture and sheen to accidental variations resulting from
the handling and positioning of the mechanically executed paint deposit itself,
Stella would now bring back Pollock’s industrial enamel and Rodchenko’s house-
painter’s brush in order to displace Johns’s somewhat fussy encaustic application
and precious pigment-and-wax combination.
Lastly, it is easy to imagine that the twenty-three-year-old Frank Stella,
renowned gamesman and athletic trickster, would have known immediately where
and how to place his masculinist shots against the by then already somewhat
parochial and comforting lore surrounding Johns’s Flag, from his origin story
claiming that the idea of painting a flag had come to him in a dream, to the queer
and quaint nod to Betsy Ross. Of course, we know all too well that painterly or
artistic oeuvres do not acquire their historical identity from a single work. At the
same time, we recognize the defining power of one particular invention or inter-
vention, the singular work or gesture that signals a decisive departure, epistemic
break, or historical reorientation that an artist can initiate.
Johns’s Flag undoubtedly was one of those moments in which the place and
function of painting in the present are fundamentally redefined. And Stella’s
Black Paintings undoubtedly responded to and challenged that definition on all
accounts, including what I would like to call Stella’s renewal of the “law of the
father” in painting.
It is then through the series of Black Paintings that Stella repositions himself
in direct dialogue with Barnett Newman, across and above the encounter and
11. Rosalind Krauss, “Jasper Johns: The Functions of Irony,” October 2 (Summer 1976), p. 95.
140 OCTOBER
peculiar difficulty that these paintings’ titling poses and proposes—precisely with
regard to the possible and impossible forms of meaning-production within non-
representational painting after World War II. Furthermore, we should develop
more of an understanding of the particular rhetoric of provocative enunciation
and the maneuvers of a simultaneous announcement and disavowal that the titles
perform, even if, or particularly because, there are only three titles with Nazi ref-
erences within the initial group of fifteen (eventually twenty-three) works, which
otherwise tend to invoke a wide variety of calamities, sites of minor disaster, places
of deviance. This strange imbalance between three and twenty could at first
appear to simply dissolve the focus on those paintings that explicitly refer to the
greatest catastrophe of human history. And we would have to wonder if their
placement within that series would not even banalize the reference within a
strange gesture of equivocation, effacement, if not scandalous equation of minor
calamities with the incomparable event of the Holocaust.
work of silence and refusal performs acts of solidarity with the actual subjects of
physical and psychic annihilation in recent history.
Yet Adorno’s aesthetic negativity is not only compelled by gestures of solidarity
with the victims of the past; it also subverts and resists the ideological agenda of the
linguistic apparatus of repression in the present. Adorno’s strategies of writerly with-
drawal as a negation of immediate communication resist ideology’s claim to appear
once again as the “natural.” His syntactical and grammatical torsions and distortions
dissolve what Roman Jakobson once called “the grime of language”: precisely those
unconscious ideological identities that appear as seemingly guaranteed by the itera-
tive and affirmative capacities of the language of the everyday in the same manner
that Stella eliminates once again all possibilities of a reference to the iconicity of
everyday life from his work. It is precisely this conflict, namely the situation of an
avant-garde culture after the total failure of enlightenment, that Adorno and
Horkheimer had recognized in 1947. Their description seems to match the conflict-
ed forms of abstraction and meaning production that govern the Black Paintings
and their titles, when they state the following: “if Enlightenment does not accommo-
date reflection on its recidivist element, then it seals its own fate. Pragmatized logic
yields to the violence of rationalism and positivism.”14
It seems to me then that Leo Steinberg’s once scandalous account of the
conditions of American postwar abstraction (especially of the second-generation
New York School artists who were so central to the writing of Greenberg, Fried,
and Rubin) was descriptively accurate, if historically incomplete, in its analysis of
the tendencies in early 1960s American painting and the criticism that accompa-
nied it. It is worth quoting at length:
In the criticism of the relevant paintings there is rarely a hint of
expressive purpose, nor recognition that pictures function in human
experience. The painter’s industry is a closed loop. The search for the
holistic design is justified and self-perpetuating. Whether this search is
still the exalted Kantian process of self-criticism seems questionable;
the claim strikes me rather as a remote intellectual analogy. And other
analogies suggest themselves, less intellectual but closer to home. It is
probably no chance coincidence that the descriptive terms which have
dominated American formalist criticism these past fifty years run paral-
lel to the contemporaneous evolution of the Detroit automobile.15
Situating the work of Frank Stella within that historical trajectory would also allow
us to understand that to take the implications of his three titles in the Black
Paintings seriously does not establish an unbridgeable chasm between the Black
14. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), trans. John
Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1987), p. 236.
15. Leo Steinberg, “Reflections on the State of Criticism” (1972), reprinted in Branden Joseph,
ed., Robert Rauschenberg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), p. 28.
144 OCTOBER
Paintings and the subsequent series of the Aluminum and Copper paintings: their
apparently anodyne and totally dehistoricized expansion of abstraction into the
field of the spatial—the sculptural, if not the quasi-architectural. Quite the oppo-
site: the new technocratic order and the large scale of those series deliberately sus-
pend themselves between the design culture of the corporate logo and the deco-
ration of the lobby of the very corporation for which they might serve as brand.
They quite accurately point to the historical affinity and continuity between totali-
tarian politics in the recent past and corporate culture in the present. It is no
small achievement for Stella to have envisioned the fate of abstraction as early as
he did, and to have mimetically and relentlessly subjected abstraction itself to its
proper historical dynamics: to relegate its utopian aspirations to the last resort of
corporate decoration, of which Stella’s later work would become a voluntary and
inextricable part.