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Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography
ArtForum, Nov, 1995 by Peter Plagens
"Then there is my noble and biographical friend," said Sir Charles Wetherell about 150 years ago, "who has added a new terror to death." Sir Charles couldn't, of course, have been talking about Sidney Guberman, the painter and, now, biographer of Frank Stella, but he could have been floating a note in a bottle for Stella, who should have been forewarned by somebody: although Guberman's Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography dishes nary a speck of dirt, it fails to make Stella the man into anything nearly as substantive as Stella the artist.
The book's subtitle, An Illustrated Biography, is an omen: it makes you suspect (at least it made me suspect) that Stella said to Guberman fold friends, the two first met at Princeton in 1955) something along the lines of, "I'm not really into a biography, but I guess it's OK if it isn't one of those tell-all books." Guberman probably answered something like, That'll be all right, because it'll also be a kind of coffee-table book, with lots of color pictures of your work." As it turns out, Guberman's book is not only as softball on Stella's life as an Entertainment Tonight interview, it's deferential on Stella's art. Take, for instance, the question of whether some of the career-starting "Black Paintings, were initially" painted in another artsier color like red. Guberman writes, "But if you take a look at Morro Castle ... you will see what Franz Fedier, a painter and teacher at the Basel Beaux-Arts and a respected critic, has seen. Beneath the black a dark red appears at the edges of the stripes. Was the picture initially in color? Red?" Is it expecting too much of a biographer to think he might have asked his living, healthy, articulate subject whether he did, in fact, first paint Morro Castle something other than black?
This kind of tiptoeing is particularly bothersome because it implies some explosive sensitivity when in fact, these days, extremely successful artists like Stella haven't usually led especially eventful lives. Having elevated themselves into small versions of industrial or publishing magnates, they live like Republicans. Their stories, such as they are, resemble '50s Technicolor biopics. There's the unassuming background (born in 1936, Stella was the son of a Massachusetts gynecologist, and was picked on in grade school as a "guinea"), the first encounter with meaningful art (a 1958 trip to New York to see a Jasper Johns show), the break with family conventions (the decision not to attend law school), the fateful visit from a Mr. Big who says, in effect, I like the way you handle your dukes, kid ("The next time Castelli visited Frank in August 1959, he took Dorothy Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art") the early success (Miller's "Sixteen Americans" show of 1959, and the art-world buzz following thereon), the slump or doubt or personal crisis (Stella is weak in this department; once fired up, his engine never stalled), and, finally, maturity and deserved renown.
This is not to say that Frank Stella delivers no goods al all. All insider audience will find many fascinating tidbits. For instance, it was Walter Darby, Bannard, another Princeton chum, who, clued Stella in about notching his painting formats: "Well, if you don't want them [leftover parts of the compositions], then just take them away." The copper paint of a notable Stella period was the same fluid with which his father barnacle-proofed his boat. Ivan Karp and Leo Castelli had Stella paint "baby versions" of the copper paintings for quick sale in the thousand dollar range." Andy, Warhol commissioned Stella to do a half-dozen foot-square versions of the "Benjamin Moore" series. And the stretcher bill for the "Protractor" series came to $50,000 in 1970s money. But the larger issues of Stella's career - e.g. exactly how in hell did he get a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Fucking Art when he was just 12 years out of college!-are loosely examined. Eyewitness Guberman writes, "We took a walk in the neighborhood, then stopped for a coffee where Barbara [rose] announced that Bill Rubin, now chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, had invited Frank to have a one-man show there in the spring of 1970. He would be thirty-four years old."
In his preface, Guberman acknowledges the help of The New Yorker stalwart John McPhee in crafting the proposal for his book. That magazine's clubby nonchalance, where big-time deals are struck casually between chinoed pals on weekends, is ladled all over this book. Consequently, after Andover and Princeton (the best chapters), crucial events take place off-page. Neither Stella nor Guberman tells us what hit the fan when Frank, Jr., told Frank, Sr., that he'd bagged law school to paint. We don't even hear about Dr. Stella again until. "Sometime in the mid 60s, Stella's father started showing up at Frank's openings." And then it's only to set the stage for Stella senior's decease in 1969, which allows Guberman to observe, with less than lyric subtlety, "His death was a blow to Frank."
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