Editing Frank Stella (section)

== Critical reception ==
Writer and curator [[Klaus Ottmann]] says many art critics were outraged when Stella's [[Black Paintings (Stella)|Black Paintings]] (1958–60) were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "16 Americans" (1959-1960) exhibition. [[Irving Sandler]] attributed the death of American gesture painting to the mortal blow dealt by these reductive and non-allusive paintings. According to Ottman, "Today, they are universally considered seminal works of 20th-century American art."<ref name="Ottman2011"/>

According to critic Megan O'Grady, art critics were shocked by the "Black Paintings", with their purposely flat affect, their extreme reductiveness, and their "refusal to appease". In her view, the young artist had been inspired by the artists he admired in New York, among them [[Barnett Newman]], [[Jackson Pollock]], and [[Willem de Kooning]], and felt that he was allowed freedom to do whatever he wanted with painting.<ref name="O'Grady2020"/> She writes that critics have always been disconcerted by the fact that "the godfather of Minimalist painting" became a forbear of modern baroque.

The art historian and critic [[Douglas Crimp]] writes that the notion of art as existing detached from everything else and autonomous proceeds from the logic of modernism, and is a notion maintained by contemporary painting into the 1980s. Painting is understood as having an origin and an essential nature, and its historical development as being a long, unbroken panorama. According to Crimp, the stylistic change that occurred during the late 1970s in Frank Stella's work embodied this art historical view of painting and how it operates to maintain the practice of painting. By his lights, Stella's shift to the "flamboyantly idiosyncratic constructed works" of this period was "a kind of quantum leap" compared to his breakout works of the late 1950s.<ref name="Crimp1993">{{cite book |last1=Crimp |first1=Douglas |title=On the Museum's Ruins |year=1993 |publisher=MIT Press |isbn=978-0-262-53126-9 |pages=98–99 |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=b3NefTf5ggYC&pg=PA98 |chapter=The End of Painting}}</ref>

For Crimp it was Stella's earliest paintings which suggested to his fellows that the end of painting had at last arrived. He sees Stella as working in profound torment over the inferences made by those early works, moving ever further away from them, and disavowing them more vehemently with every new series. Crimp goes on to say the late 1970s paintings "are truly hysterical in their defiance of the black paintings; each one reads as a tantrum, shrieking and sputtering that the end of painting has not come".<ref name="Crimp1993"/>

Viewing some of Stella's large scale works at a 1982 exhibition in the [[Addison Gallery of American Art|Addison Gallery]] at the [[Phillips Academy]], critic Kenneth Baker voiced a dissenting opinion. He wrote in ''[[The Phoenix (newspaper) | The Boston Phoenix]]'' that "The physical impact of the recent works is unsettling. They make you want to back away; you're not sure how firmly they're anchored to the wall. But soon you realize that any object of comparable size might have the same impact. That this question arises at all suggests how small a part 'painting' plays here. Stella’s stvle resides wholly in the design of these objects, and their designs are just not that interesting to contemplate."<ref>{{cite news |last1=Baker |first1=Kenneth |title=Less than Stella: Big is not always beautiful |url=https://archive.org/details/sim_boston-phoenix_1982-11-30_11_48/page/7/mode/1up |access-date=6 October 2024 |work=The Boston Phoenix |date=30 November 1982}}</ref>

When the Whitney Museum of American Art exhibited its Frank Stella retrospective in 2015, art critic [[Jerry Saltz]] reminded viewers that Stella had declared "I don't make Conceptual Art. I need the physical thing to work with or against." Saltz advised them to think literally, and in terms of the space the works occupy and the nature of their surfaces, seeing color as an element of their structures. He described Stella as being one of "the first to deal as directly as possible with the perception of material, form, and color", "the first hard-core Minimalist painter", and "a forerunner to the Postminimalism that defined the late 1960s and 1970s". Saltz goes on to say "even though he's prone to cranking out a lot of work that looks like God-awful space junk, I always pay attention to this artist".<ref name="Saltz2015">{{cite web |last1=Saltz |first1=Jerry |last2=critic |first2=New York's senior art |title=Toward a Unified Theory of Frank Stella |url=https://www.vulture.com/2015/10/toward-a-unified-theory-of-frank-stella.html |website=Vulture |archive-url=http://web.archive.org/web/20151031122949/http://www.vulture.com/2015/10/toward-a-unified-theory-of-frank-stella.html |archive-date=31 October 2015 |date=30 October 2015}}</ref>