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Paperback Working Space Book

ISBN: 0674959612

ISBN13: 9780674959613

Working Space

(Part of the The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures Series)

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Format: Hardcover

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Book Overview

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 G ricault 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.

Customer Reviews

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Rated 4 stars
Working Space

Frank Stella's 'Working Space' is the publication of a series of Charles Eliot Norton lectures given in 1983-4. By this time of course, Stella's heyday was long gone- the 1960s, when Michael Fried and his acolytes could fuss over whether the latest Stella could "compel conviction." Similarly, Stella's time a young rebel was also firmly in the past. In 1960, Robert Goldwater chaired a panel on modern art, where Stella claimed...

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Rated 4 stars
A Case for Space

I trudged through this book up until Stella made one point so poignant and concise that I felt absolutely no need to continue reading it. Stella makes a case for "The Religious Experience." The moment when a work of art becomes an indelible part of the literal space of the viewer, that moment when a viewer is so convinced of the reality and gravity of the pictorial space (or flatness)of a work that they accept it as truth...

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Rated 5 stars
An important document

Frank Stella is one of contemporary art's most challenging and compelling figures. This series of lectures presents his view as to how nonrepresentational art has gone astray by focusing on an excessively cold northern tradition, following it from Mondrian up through the color-field painters. He looks now instead to a warmer mediterranean strain that he traces up through Reubens and Picasso, as his own solution to the possible...

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