Pushing the limits

MMoCA Nights hosts Frank Stella and his fantastical prints

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Frank Stella, the octogenarian artist, enters the glass doors of a packed exhibit room on the second floor of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA). Hands in his pockets, he weaves through clusters of admirers, pausing for a second near a print. It’s almost as if his own explosive abstract creation is going to reach out and pull him in.

Against the riot of color, Stella blends in with the rest of the crowd: He could be an aficionado of the more than 100 prints that cover the walls, blasting colors, shapes and textures from each frame.

 It’s Friday, Feb. 5, and Stella is in the museum for the opening reception of Frank Stella Prints: A Retrospective, the artist’s first major print retrospective since 1982, which will be on display through May 22.

The evening begins with Stella in conversation with Richard H. Axsom, MMoCA exhibition curator, and Jordan Schnitzer, the print collector who is loaning much of the collection to the museum. It is moderated by Stephen Fleischman, MMoCA museum director. Fleischman scans the sold-out auditorium. “I didn’t know if I was going to get a seat tonight,” he says. “It’s an amazing accomplishment and an amazing career.”

Stella takes the stage, cocktail in hand. He chuckles modestly when MMoCA introduces him as one of the most important living American artists. As a teenager, Stella enjoyed painting, but he had no idea what his future held. “It wasn’t anything definite that this would be my career,” Stella says. “It’s the little things that appear later on that make a difference.” One of those things is when he failed his Army physical induction exam. “I went back to my studio and drifted on,” he says.

Stella is known for advancing the history of abstraction through paintings, metal reliefs, sculptures and prints. The exhibition includes a broad survey of editioned prints; color trial proofs; an oil, ground glass and crayon painting; and a mixed media metal-relief painting from the artist’s personal collection. It also is the occasion for the publication of Frank Stella Prints, a revised and expanded second edition of The Prints of Frank Stella: A Catalogue Raisonné, 1967–1982 (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1983), which was produced by Axsom and published by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in association with MMoCA.

Stella takes a sip of his cocktail. “The prints are not the same,” he says. “That’s what helps them. People can do things and work on things at both ends in the etching and papermaking. All of those things begin to need each other and everything comes together in a dramatic way.” When people characterize his art as breaking the rules, it becomes clear that Stella doesn’t believe there were rules to begin with. From one collection to the next, his art morphs, helping redefine the history of art.

Axsom calls the prints a “grand entanglement,” offering a huge range of expression. “If I were to write a history of the modern print, Frank’s prints would get a chapter on their own,” he says. “They are that important in terms of contribution.”

Axsom adds that Stella’s work has the ability to draw people in personally and immediately: “They cause you to pause and compel you to think of why you have paused.”

The prints were pulled from the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, a Portland-based nonprofit whose mission is to make the prints accessible to museums in diverse communities. On stage, Schnitzer recalls the first time he saw a Stella print. It was 1979 in Portland. “I didn’t know whose it was,” he says. “I was overwhelmed. His work has pushed dimensions in ways that have never been done before.”

With a passion and glowing love for all the art he buys, Schnitzer admits he was nervous to meet Stella. In October, he asked Stella how he felt the morning after his exhibit debuted at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. “He turned to me and said, ‘Jordan, I was glad it was over so I could get back to my studio and make art.’”