Working Space

By Frank Stella

Harvard University Press; $14.95; 167 pages.

FRANK STELLA IS the Daniel Boone of the art world. While the hardy backwoods pioneer opened new lands to satisfy his hunger for "elbow room," Stella has spent his 20-year painting career trying to create "working space," his term for the expansive three-dimensional illusions painted by the post-Renaissance master Caravaggio.

Admittedly, the connection between Caravaggio's action-packed religious paintings and the geometric day-glo of Stella's enormous abstract works is pretty hard to see at first glance. But there is a connection, and you don't have to take my word for it. Stella himself has devoted 167 richly illustrated pages to drawing it out.

The text has been culled from the prestigious Norton Lectures which Stella delivered in 1982 and 1983. His argument is synopsized very nicely on the back of the volume:

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.

Despite his use of the art-crit lingo that is a hazard of the profession, the Andover-Princeton educated Stella does a fine job of explaining how Caravaggio's painting surpassed the tradition of trompe l'oeil--literally "fool the eye," meaning those paintings designed to be mistaken for real. Stella believes Caravaggio's greatest accomplishment was in his command of space, painting figures that not only look three-dimensional, but seem to expand out of the front and back of the canvas.

Working Space is unusually reader-friendly. Almost every painting Stella mentions has been conveniently reproduced for the reader's study, a practice that should be made mandatory for all books about art.

STELLA HAS TWO things on his agenda. The first is to provide his own manifesto: the ringing intellectual statement that will enable the heiress who can afford a Stella to explain to her Mount Holyoke-educated friends what those lines and curves are all about. At one time, a decent knowledge of classical mythology and the Bible was enough to understand what a painter was up to. Today, even an encyclopedic knowledge of contemporary art can fail to inform the art-hungry heiress what her new Abstract Expressionist masterpiece is supposed to express.

Of course, for most of the rising and risen stars of the art heaven that is New York, being misunderstood is as good as being understood--if the public reaction is positive and the buyer has signed the check.

Stella has been around long enough that he doesn't have to worry about the apologists, critics and gallery rats who normally give the word on an artist. He has won the safety of a reputation in case the powers that be mislike his thoughts. More important, he is knowledgeable and articulate enough to make a strong case for his ideas.

However, this book is more than just an intro to the coldwater SoHo loft that is Frank Stella's mind. Stella has assigned himself the second task of uncovering the origin of the "crisis of abstraction," the growing consensus even among practitioners that contemporary abstract art bores the hell out of people. Stella attributes this yawning chasm between potential and performance to the flat, two-dimensional quality of the abstraction of the 1970s and '80s, heir to the tradition of highly colored "decorative" paintings exemplified by Delacroix and Malevich.

The future of modern art, according to Stella, lies in an exploration of the third dimension, using the tools of perspective and shading that abstraction has ignored. But is this enough? The examples of "interior space" that Stella presents from his own works are not very convincing arguments; exploiting the extra dimension seems to have added little to his own work. And when Julian Schnabel can go 3-D by painting on smashed crockery, one starts to wonder why Stella is making all this fuss about perspective.

WORKING SPACE stands as a valiant attempt by Stella to drag abstract painting back on the road of progress. But it's just one more intellectual breakdance in a field overrun by rhetorical jivin' and poppin'. After all, abstract painting is a mental art. Since abstraction is the mental process of selection and exaggeration, abstract art requires the intellectual equivalent of a Captain Video decoder ring to translate a picture into ordinary concepts.

The typical abstract artist picks and chooses the elements of sight that please him, becoming more and more recondite as his career goes on. Eventually the artist reaches the point of no return: painting so stripped of concrete meaning that it becomes mere interior decorating, the fate of the Mark Rothkos and Morris Louises of the world. "It clashes with my sofa," is about as much as you can say about this sort of ultra-abstraction.

The avant-garde of abstraction shot itself into outer space several years ago. Stella believes that exploring the third dimension has freshened his art, and more power to him. But a reader would have as much chance of finding the salvation of modern art in Working Space as in the latest issue of Batman.