The 19th century detective novel about Scotland Yard's search for a jewel stolen from the forehead of a Buddhist idol

Working Space (The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures)

Arts & Photography

Stella, Frank

History & Criticism

Harvard University Press

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.

Working Space

Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard University Press

Frank Stella, works and new graphics: 17 May-7 July 1985

Frank Stella: The circuits prints

Walker Art Center

1997 Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN. Scarce.

Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics

Engberg, Siri

Frank Stella: Illustrations after El Lissitzky's Had Gadya: The Unique Colour Variants

PRESTON CLARE

Waddington Custot Galleries

Frank Stella Paintings: Black Aluminum Copper

L&M Arts

Frank Stella: Painting Into Architecture

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Larry Poons: New Paintings

Bernard Jacobson Ltd

Frank Stella at Two Thousand : Changing the Rules (Contemporary Art)

Clearwater, Bonnie

Individual Artists

Museum of Contemporary Art

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