Frank Stella is guilty of a terrible crime.

At Sartle, we hate nothing more than when someone goes to a museum, sees some modern art and says obnoxiously, “Pffff! I could do that.” Well, the point of the matter, Sir, is that you didn’t do that, did you? So get this: Frank Stella saw a Vogue magazine where the models were standing in front of a Franz Kline painting and said, “I saw that and thought ‘I could do that.’” J’accuse Mr. Stella! J’accuse!

But unlike most annoying naysayers, Stella actually did do that. Taking his cues from the Abstract Expressionists, especially Jasper Johns, Stella developed a style that was less representational than even Johns’ flag paintings, and pioneered minimalism on the canvas. Basically his motto was, “Watcha see is watcha get.” He didn’t think pictures should be anything more than flat paint on a surface. And while his colorful shapes and straight lines are beautiful, they definitely aren’t trying to look like, say, a vase of sunflowers or a naked lady. 

Stella had some artistic confidence built-in as his mother was a painter. (His father was a gynecologist, but I don’t know exactly what kind of confidence one gains from that.) And he hit it big before he was even 25. While we were all trying to figure out how to pay taxes, he was showing at the MOMA. 

Not content to be pigeon-holed by his success, Stella has evolved greatly during his, ahem, fifty year career. He’s done black, he’s done color, all sorts of differently shaped canvases and even a body of sculptural work based on the novel Moby Dick. However, the world hasn’t always been too kind to his experiments. According to Travel & Leisure magazine, a work by Stella in Seoul, South Korea, has the dubious honor of being one of the "world’s ugliest public sculptures." And this is a world that houses the ‘Buttplug Gnome.’ Stella’s sculpture is ugly, though. The company even planted trees around it to try to protect poor pedestrians’ eyes.

Even though art critics think Stella’s new work is heinous, and due to physical reasons (he’s almost 80!) he has to digitally render artworks and have them fabricated, he hasn’t given up. I hate to say it...but Frank Stella was completely right when he said “I could do that.”