Frank Stella Quotes (1936-2024)

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward larger brushes. In a way, 'Abstract Expressionism' started this all. De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”

“I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the art world, but it's hard to be old and like what goes on around you. Anyway, the real point is that the things that don't seem to me to be pictorially informed are not so interesting to me.”

“Look, if you paint another painting I'm going to cut off your hands.. (I [= Carl Andre] asked Stella, 'Can't I become a good painter?') No, because you are a good sculptor now.”

“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting.. ..and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it’s certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold air, and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.”

“The artist's tool or the traditional artist's brush and maybe even oil paint are all disappearing very quickly. We use mostly commercial paint, and we generally tend toward lager brushes. In a way, Abstract expressionism started this all: De Kooning used house painter's brushes and house painters' techniques.”

“Clement Greenberg talked about the ideas or possibilities of painting in his — I think —, 'After Abstract Expressionism' article, and he allows a blank canvas to be an idea for a painting. It might not be a good idea, but it’s certainly valid. Yves Klein did the empty gallery. He sold air, and that was a conceptualized art, I guess.”

“[reacting on Donald Judd who emphasis the 'whole' of an art work] But we’re still left with structural or compositional elements. The problems aren’t any different. I still have to compose a picture, and if you make an object [as Judd does] you have to organize the structure. I don’t think our work that radical in any sense because you don’t find any really new compositional or structural element. I don’t know if that exists. It’s like the idea of the color you haven’t seen before. Does something exist that’s as radical as a diagonal that’s not a diagonal? Or a straight line or a compositional element that you can’t describe?”

“Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting.”

“I've been educated in some pretty lively barrooms, like the Cedar Bar in New York. And I went to high school with Frank Stella and when he got out of college he went to New York and started painting ... I was working with sculpture in a kind of dilatory way, and he said to come up and work in his tiny loft when he wasn't there. At the same time I sort of dabbled in a little bit of painting, and a kind of confusion. I was an eye, ear, nose, and throat person too ... One day Frank Stella just said to me, "Look, if you paint another painting I'm going to cut off your hands." I asked, "Can't I become a good painter?" Frank said, "No, because you are a good sculptor now." That's really my formal education ... the company of artists is the great education.”

“By 1958 when [Frank] Stella came to New York, the art-buying public had become convinced that Americans could produce major painting, worthy of comparison with the best of earlier European modern art. And it was now clear that this work could be sold at prices that made an artist's profession economically feasible.”