Picasso at MoMA, Stella at Whitney: One Grand Retrospective Informs Another

The long multifarious careers celebrated in the two felicitously concurrent monumental retrospectives that are now electrifying New York—Picasso Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art and Frank Stella at the Whitney Museum (both closing on Feb. 7)—invite critical comparison, which, to my knowledge, they have not yet received.

Both shows cover a roughly 60-year span, but the story for Stella, a very active participant in his show’s installation, continues full-force:

The trajectory of Picasso’s career and its critical reception may be an object lesson in how Stella’s in-progress oeuvre may eventually come to be understood and appreciated.

Only recently have Picasso’s somewhat blowsy late paintings come to be more widely admired (with the help of dealers who are keen to sell it). What the imprimatur of the Whitney (and the show’s co-organizer and originator, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth) may accomplish for Stella is an improvement in critics’ and art lovers’ perception of his often belittled, complex, sometimes chaotic “Maximalist” works of recent years.

Picasso’s witty, wacky, mostly monochromatic figurative riffs and Stella’s riotously colorful abstract improvisations (sometimes too garish for most tastes, as in the glittery example below) would appear to have little in common:

But despite the contrasts in their output, their career paths were, in many ways, strikingly similar. Each, early in his career, caught the eyes of other artists, connoisseurs and the public by rewriting the rules and becoming progenitors of celebrated new movements:

Cubism…

…and Minimalism:

But both rebelled not only against their predecessors but also against themselves, repeatedly experimenting with new materials and new ways of making things. Like Bob Dylan ditching acoustic austerity for electric energy, Picasso and Stella confused and dismayed their admirers by moving on from what their audiences had most admired.

Yet while the outward manifestations of their labors radically changed, the underlying creative impulses and aesthetic sensibilities remained consistent for each. In that sense, the oeuvre is all of one piece, defying such reductive categories as “Protractor Series” and “Exotic Birds” (Stella), or Cubist and Classic (Picasso).

Perhaps that fundamental unity is what Stella had in mind when he made this cryptic remark in a public conversation at the Whitney with its director, Adam Weinberg (reported in this tweet):

“I don’t see any reason to physically experience the works chronologically because it’s over. They’re here and now.” —#FrankStella

— Whitney Museum (@whitneymuseum) December 2, 2015

Stella’s insistence on disrupting his retrospective’s traditional chronological hang with out-of-sequence interlopers impels us to draw connections among works created during seemingly disconnected periods but driven by a singular creative intellect.

For example, it’s not hard to feel the force of chromatic resonance between this alkyd painting from the ’60s:

…and the wall sculpture from the ’80s that faces it in the same gallery, constructed from etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass:

Picasso, an inveterate scavenger (with a “magpie sensibility,” as critic Eric Gibson called it in his review of MoMA’s show, paywalled, in this month’s New Criterion), found his materials and inspiration in the supplies and objects that were readily at hand in the various locales he inhabited. “Picasso’s longstanding habits as a scavenger found rich reward in the junkyards of Vallauris,” as one of MoMA’s wall labels tells us.

Stella’s “scavenging” consists of adopting diverse strategies of fabrication, including computer-assisted design (CAD) and 3D printing. Many of his works involve feats of engineering and construction, so it’s no surprise that architectural projects became one phase of his career. (“I have a gift for structure,” he said in one of the wall-label quotes.) What is surprising is that none of his architectural projects have made it into this otherwise comprehensive survey.

When I asked director Weinberg about this omission, he mentioned that the Metropolitan Museum had recently (in 2007) mounted an exhibition of Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture (with a catalogue essay by noted architecture critic Paul Goldberger). Perhaps the thorough trashing of that show in Roberta Smith‘s NY Times review may have deterred the Whitney from revisiting that material.

Speaking of architecture, what the Guggenheim is to Kandinsky, the Whitney is to Stella—a physical setting that perfectly complements the scale and feel of the work now on display. The Stella installation was further enhanced by Selldorf Architects, who expertly tamed the fifth floor’s gargantuan 18,000-square-foot space:

Even if you don’t love this monumental hulk (I do), its perfect site, with the Hudson River as backdrop at the end of the long Stella voyage, is a powerful coda: