| Artist: | Frank Stella |
|
|---|---|---|
| Title: | Die Fahne hoch! (Flags on High!) | |
| Date: | 1959 | |
| Nationality: | American | |
| Context: | Minimalism | |
| Movement: | ||
| Materials: | oil on canvas | |
| Subject: part of the early Black series in which geometry controls the compositional design; hard-edge abstraction in which the black is painted and the white "pin stripes" are actually the canvas left unpainted; no illusionistic space Emphasis on the flat picture plane; is it a cross or a crossing? They seem like icons negated, (one critic called the Black series "semi-icons for a spiritual blankness"); they are very Zen in their rejection of worldy values; formalism; pictures about nothing except the literal, flat picture plane; influenced by Jasper Johns's flag paintings and by Nazi flags ("The thing that stuck in my mind was the Nazi newreels; that big draped swastika--the big hanging flag--has pretty much those proportions"); despite these associations, he wants the focus to be the literal surface ("If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. . . . All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. . . . What you see is what you see.") Style: hard-edge geometric abastraction that offers an easily grasped gestalt or a non-relational, wholistic design; asserts the flatness of the pictorial field; no modeling; no variation in tone; no illusionistic space; no personal touch Context: part of Minimalism's efforts to strip the image down to its skeletal primary structure; "less is more;" focus on the surface plane; you cannot read back into space illusionistically here, but only laterally across the surface; you cannot even read from part to part; Stella focuses on shape as the critical factor that fills the field; the painter as problem solver, rigorously systematic rather than emotional or expressionistic. Reductionism reminiscent of Ad Reinhardt's Black paintings ("If you don't know what they're about," Stella said of Reinhardt's Black paintings, "you don't know what painting is about.") | ||
