Frank Stella: Quotes about art

“Yes, the aluminum paint... What happened, at least for me, is that when I first started painting I would see Pollock, de Kooning, and the one thing they all had that I didn't have was an art school background. They were brought up on drawing and they all ended up painting or drawing with the brush. They got away from the smaller brushes and, in an attempt to free themselves, they got involved in commercial paint and house-painting brushes, Still it was basically drawing with paint, which has the characterized almost all twentieth century painting. The way my own painting was going, drawing was less and less necessary. It was the one thing I wasn't going to do. I wasn't going to draw with the brush.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 120

School , Art , Way , Drawing

“I think I had been badly affected by.... the romance of Abstract Expressionism... particularly as it filtered out to places like Princeton and around the country, which was the idea of the 'artist as a terrifically sensitive ever-changing, ever ambitious person', particularly [described] in magazines like 'Art News' and 'Arts', which I read religiously.. I began to feel very strongly about finding a way that wasn't so wrapped up in the hullabaloo.... something that stable in a sense, something that wasn't constantly a record of your sensitivity, a record of flux.”

Frank Stella

reacting on a question about 'gesture' panting
Quote in: Frank Stella, William S. Rubin, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 13
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Art , Way , Feeling , Idea

“They just want to get a handle on you and the idea, and that's enough. Some people sense more but they don't really get into it because it's going one step too far. But the whole idea of making art is to be open, to be generous, and absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them go into it. I have to go into all those places in order to make it work.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 29.

People , Art , Idea , Sense

“When Morris Louis showed in 1958, everybody [like in 'Art News', by Tom Hess ] dismissed his work as thin, merely decorative. They still do. Louis is the really interesting case... In every sense his instincts were Abstract Expressionist, and he was terribly involved with all of that, but he felt he had to move, too.”

Frank Stella

Frank Stella in: The New York school – the painters & sculptors of the fifties, Irving Sandler, Harper & Row, Publishers, 1978, p. 319 note 68
quote of Stella, 1960's, concerning the position of stain painting
Quotes, 1960 - 1970

Art , Sense

“The aim of art is to create space - space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live.”

Frank Stella

Quoted in: Alan D. Bryce (2007) Art Smart: Art Smart: The Intelligent Guide to Investing in the Canadian Art Market. p. 55
Quotes, 1971 - 2000

Art , Painting

“I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 30.

World , Art

“When people still talk about art that I made in the 60's— most of them never saw it, and they never lived through it, and they don't have a clue about it. The idea that they know what minimalism is is absurd. I don't know what minimalism is!”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1971 - 2000, Bomb: X Motion Picture and Center for New Art Activities, 2000, p. 29.

People , Art , Idea

“Ken Noland has put things in the center [of the painting] and I'll use a symmetric pattern, but we use symmetry in a different way. It's non-relational. In the newer American painting [in contrast to European geometric art] we strive to get the thing in the middle, and symmetrical, but just to get a kind of force, just to get the thing on the canvas. The balance factor isn't important.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 118

Art , Way , Painting

“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his - I think -, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it's certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold 'air', and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.”

Frank Stella

Source: Quotes, 1960 - 1970, Questions to Stella and Judd' - September 1966, p. 122

Art , Idea , Thinking , Painting