Frank Stella's Saving Abstraction at the National Gallery of Australia is exceptionally impressive printmaking
Saving Abstraction by Frank Stella. Orde Poynton Gallery, National Gallery of Australia. Until July 17.
The artist Frank Stella (born 1936) and the master printer Ken Tyler (born 1931) have been making prints together since 1967, but after almost 40 years, there is no such thing as a "typical" Stella print. There is an enormous diversity and experimental variety.
Frank Stella's Star of Persia II from the Star of Persia series where the stripes and lines develop a hypnotic intensity.
Early in the collaborative process, Stella's prints appeared as a small tributary that ran alongside the mighty river of his painting practice and closely reflected the formal and conceptual concerns in his paintings, subsequently his printmaking broke free and went off on its own exploratory tangents. Despite his protestations, Stella progressively abandoned the idea that printmaking was a way for breeding cheaper images of paintings and, almost against his wishes, he became a real printmaker.
The National Gallery in Canberra has been working closely with Ken Tyler since the early 1970s when, under the inaugural director James Mollison, Tyler's West Coast archive was purchased. In subsequent decades, Tyler became a friend and supporter of the gallery and, through gift or purchase, copies of most of the things that he printed have entered the collection, together with much of his archive. As Tyler has worked with many of the prominent artists of his day, including Josef Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, David Hockney, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Edward Ruscha, Frank Stella and Andy Warhol, the collection is impressive and has become of international significance.
Of all of Tyler's collaborations, probably the most lasting and intense relationship has been between Tyler and Stella and a cross-section of prints from this collaboration has been brought together in this exhibition. The earliest prints in this show are the black-and-white and colour lithographs from 1967 where the immaculate and crisp images largely follow the developments in his minimalist-inspired paintings of the time. They are very clean and elegant images, especially from the Star of Persia series, where the stripes and lines develop a hypnotic intensity.
By 1971, Stella had moved into the Newfoundland series of colour lithographs and screenprints and attained what could be described as his signature style, with flat pure colours, sharp masked lines and an engaging and teasing play with optical spaces and perspectival strategies. The editions are modest, usually numbering in the 70s, and the scale impressive, on occasion approaching a metre by two metres.
It was in the following decade that Stella seems to have settled on his modus operandi as a printmaker and on his practice of cannibalising his earlier work to act as a starting point for the next experiment. The prints become more complicated in every aspect of the word – technically, conceptually, in their palette and in spatial structure.
The showstopper print in Stella's oeuvre and in the exhibition is his gigantic print The Fountain (1992) – a 67-colour woodcut enhanced with intaglio and screenprints coming together with the overall dimensions of 231 centimetres by 700 centimetres – it is a seriously large print. It is also a very American work – huge and glitzy and pulling in all directions. In these later prints Stella appears as an artist who is terrified of leaving a single unoccupied square centimetre, so there is a riot of colours, shapes and ambiguous compositional nooks and perspectival projections. The Fountain effectively stops the viewer in their tracks as they are progressively mesmerised, intrigued and enveloped in the work.
Following this tour de force creation, many of Stella's subsequent prints, including the extensive Moby Dick series, continue with the baroque exuberance, exploring the collaging aspects of printmaking with a combination of unlikely visual strategies and techniques. The inflated three-dimensional prints, which appear like pregnant pieces of paper, are curious in their appearance and not particularly effective once the novelty wears off.
Tyler once proudly announced that one of his early revelations was that "great artists make great prints" and he subsequently went out to attract to his workshop artists who already had established reputations and seduced them to make prints, sometimes for the first time. Stella was one of his most significant converts and one for whom the answer was always "yes", no matter how great and extravagant the technical challenge. At the end of the day, what was produced was an exceptionally impressive body of work, non-figurative in its pictorial language and glittering in its technical virtuosity.