Frank Stella at 73 Needs $5 Million to Fund Work, Cuban Cigars - Bloomberg.com
“This is not allowed to be on the table,” he said with a husky voice and a smile.
At 73, Stella is trim, moves nimbly and has the rough hands of a workman. He said he will be awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama on Nov. 10.
We met recently at Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York’s Chelsea district to talk about “Polychrome Relief,” his new exhibition there.
Swirling, coiling and piercing shapes made of resin and steel converge and collide in these three-dimensional vortexes of color and space. Some hang on metal hooks. Others are 12 to 15 feet tall.
The works were inspired by Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord sonatas, which Stella listened to as a student at Princeton University. Now he is channeling their verve into baroque sculptural compositions.
Stella: The beauty of it is there are so many sonatas that no matter how many pieces I make I won’t run out.
Kazakina: How do they relate to your new work?
Stella: These are abstract forms. And music is abstract. The sonatas have an everyday quality and yet they are transformative. And that’s what making art is like.
Kazakina: Scarlatti seems like a very sophisticated music choice for a college student.
Stella: He was in vogue at the time. I used to listen to it a lot. There was a revival of interest in the harpsichord.
Kazakina: What brought him back into your life?
The Right Age
Stella: I was reading about Scarlatti and his compositions in a book by musicologist Ralph Kirkpatrick. It’s very intense and it rekindled my interest in Scarlatti. Most of this work Scarlatti undertook when he was over 65. So I was at the right age to take on the idea.
Kazakina: This exhibition follows your big retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. It was a coronation of sorts.
Stella: An apotheosis.
Kazakina: How do you move your work forward after such a high point?
Stella: Exhibiting is how you make a living. You can sell everything, but you still have to go to work the next day. I have to earn money to make the work. So I work for the work. It rules me completely financially, psychically, physically.
Kazakina: Sounds rough.
Poverty of Imagination
Stella: It’s not any harder than digging ditches. It’s the poverty of imagination that defines us.
Kazakina: The new works look insanely complex. How do you pull this off?
Stella: I just deal with the physical reality of having them stand up and not break apart. They are fragile so the steel tubing is to create support for them.
Kazakina: What’s the starting point?
Stella: It starts with some pieces that I make by hand. Some are found objects. We scan them. A lot of the design takes place on the computer, so you can turn it and turn it and turn it.
Kazakina: You have been a working artist for 50 years. Do you wake up every morning and go to the studio?
Stella: No, I wake up every morning thinking about servicing my debt. I have to pay for what I do. And in the last 20 years, I’ve done it all by myself.
Kazakina: Don’t you have a dealer supporting your production?
Stella: No. There’s just not enough capital to keep going at the rate that I make work.
What It Takes
Kazakina: How much is that?
Stella: Take a guess.
Kazakina: $10 million a year?
Stella: No, not that much, but half of that would be close. That’s not so easy to come up with.
Kazakina: Even if you worked with someone like Larry Gagosian?
Stella: I’ve been with Larry. It’s hard to get money out of him. He’s responsible to, essentially, the stockholders who are putting up the money. Those guys want 17-18 percent return on their money. I am not that successful.
Kazakina: I find it hard to believe.
Stella: I am not in fashion.
Kazakina: How do you feel about young artists becoming super hot right out of art schools?
Stella: Just because they are successful right away doesn’t really mean much. It means they are successful now, but like everybody else they have to worry about tomorrow.
Manet, Malevich
Kazakina: What artists influenced you?
Stella: I grew up madly in love with Velazquez and Manet. And here I am sort of deeply entrenched with Malevich and Kandinsky.
Kazakina: How does the art world factor into your life?
Stella: There is the art world in which I live and have to function in. And there’s the art world which has been given to me, which is the past. And it’s the most sustaining thing.
You don’t get carried away because you see how you fit into it, if you fit at all. It’s pretty infinitesimal, the space that you occupy. What matters is that you are part of the organism and that you feel alive that way.
“Polychrome Relief” is on view through Nov. 7 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 10th Ave. near 27th Street. Prices range from $275,000 to $850,000. Information: +1-212-563-4474; http://www.paulkasmingallery.com.
(Katya Kazakina is a reporter for Bloomberg News. The opinions expressed are her own.)
To contact the reporter of this story: Katya Kazakina in New York at kkazakina@bloomberg.net.
