Working Space

Stella, Frank

ISBN 10: 0674959612 / ISBN 13: 9780674959613

Edité par Harvard University Press, 1986

A propos de cet article

176 pp. "generously illustrated" with B/W and full-colour photos. Cover quite worn, as are corners of book block. Copy to read (or keep in your studio for inspiration) rather than to display on a coffee table. Stella here analyzes his own work, as well as that of other artists. Oversized volume may require additional shipping.

N° de réf. du vendeur 001847

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: Working Space
• Éditeur: Harvard University Press
• Date de parution: 1986
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0674959612
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780674959613
• Reliure: Soft cover
• État de l'article: Good
• État de la jaquette: No Jacket
• Catalogues du vendeur:
  • Art

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

"A bombshell...this is a book that explodes many received ideas about abstraction...[It] is certainly one of the most remarkable books ever written on the subject. What makes it so remarkable, of course, is that Stella is unquestionably the most celebrated abstract painter of his generation."--Hilton Kramer, Atlantic

Working Space affords a rare opportunity to view painting from the inside out, through the eyes of one of the world's most prominent abstract painters. Frank Stella describes his perception of other artists' work, as well as his own, in this handsomely illustrated volume.

Stella uses the crisis of representational art in sixteenth-century Italy to illuminate the crisis of abstraction in our time. The artists who followed Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian searched for new directions to advance their work from beneath the shadow of these great painters. Caravaggio pointed the way. So today, Stella believes, the successors to Picasso, Kandinsky, and Pollock must seek a pictorial space as potent as the one Caravaggio developed at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Stella sees Caravaggio as the pivot on whom painting turns, his consummate illusionism prompting the advance of a more flexible, more "real" space that allows painting to move and breathe, to suggest extension and unrestricted motion. Following Caravaggio, Rubens' broad vision of fullness and active volume gave painting a momentum that helped propel it into the nineteenth century, where it came to rest in the genius of Géricault and Manet, themselves the precursors of modern painting.

Unfortunately, both contemporary abstract art and figurative painting have become trapped by ambiguous pictorial space and by a misguided emphasis on materiality (pigment for pigment's sake). Pictorial qualities have given way to illustrational techniques. Abstract art has become verbal, defensive, and critical, caught up in theology masquerading as theory. Stella asserts that painting must understand its past, make use of the lucid realism of seventeenth-century Italy, and absorb a Mediterranean physicality to reinforce the lean spirituality of northern abstraction pioneered by Mondrian and Malevich. Working Space will provoke discussion and argument, not least because Stella offers nontraditional evaluations of the works of giants such as Raphael, Titian, Michelangelo, Picasso, and Pollock, as well as lesser-known figures including Annibale Carracci, Paulus Potter, and Morris Louis. The artist's powers of discernment and the profusion of his ideas and opinions will dazzle and engage professionals, amateurs, and students of art.

À propos de l'auteur

Frank Stella (1936-2024) was an American painter and sculptor. A pioneer of minimalist abstraction in the late 1950s, Stella received the National Medal of Arts in 2009. His work has been the subject of retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.