Still shell-shocked and depressed by last week's Right-Wing Apocalypse, Out There and our partner-in-crime Pepi headed to the Embarcadero Cinemas to catch a screening of director Barry Jenkins' beautiful, soulful film "Moonlight." It was a necessary balm. Jenkins' screenplay, from a story by Tarell Alvin McCraney, tells a story of what it's like to grow up poor, black and gay in a rough Miami neighborhood. It's a poetic meditation on connection and love. Watch for more discussion of it in these pages in our year-end best-films coverage. Meantime see it yourself.
Catalog Riches
We've been immersing ourselves in the catalog for "Frank Stella: A Retrospective," the exhibition now on offer at the de Young Museum (through Feb. 26, 2017), organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas, where the show originated. The hefty tome was edited by Michael Auping, Chief Curator at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Yale University Press), and it offers an enticing introduction to Stella's output.
Getting to know an art exhibit's catalog means learning in depth about an artist's background, intentions, critical reception and impact. The Stella catalog includes essays describing Stella's art practice and philosophy, a transcription of a lecture the artist gave at Pratt Institute, an interview, a chronology of exhibitions and bibliography, an exhibition checklist, and most importantly, 95 full-color plates of the artwork. It's all handsomely packaged in hardcover, with pieces cut out of the front and back covers, in mimicry of the artist's influential shaped canvasses.
Among the insights we gleaned from Auping's essay: With a day job painting houses, the young artist Stella used enamel house paint and a house-painter's brush to make his early works. "He approached the canvas the way he would paint a house, as a form of geography to be mapped out and covered." His Benjamin Moore series (1962) gets its name from the American paint company that produces interior house paints. "The color is neither projective nor visually absorbent, but, as Stella puts it, 'dead.' "
"Stella's self-deprecating statement 'I'm not a colorist' refers to the fact that, for him, the function of color is not beauty, symbolism, or metaphor for its own sake. Within his abstractions, color is employed to manipulate our perception of space."
The curators' and art historians' expertise helps to fill in a lot of the story of how Stella's work fits into currents of art history, coming out of a tradition of innovation and building on it. For instance, seeing a reproduction of Wassily Kandinsky's "Farbige Linten" from 1924 side by side with a photo of Stella's "K.17 (lattice variations) protogen RPT (full-size)" from 2008 is instructive in illustrating just how essential the early abstract artist's work is in the continuing story of art in the 21st century. Art appreciation is so cool.