ABSTRACT

In 1983-84 Frank Stella delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University. These have recently been published under the title Working Space. Stella's aim in these lectures is to comment on the present state of painting and to propose a program for its future development. Abstract painting today, however, is in a period of crisis, a crisis that Stella believes is analogous to the crisis in European painting at the end of the sixteenth century. The heroes of Stella's art-historical tale are Caravaggio, and Rubens. Stella states the problem facing twentieth-century painting by reference to Picasso. Picasso is said to have abandoned Cubism because it was in danger of making everything flat. Stella is very much aware that there is a connection of some sort between the kind of space he values and the human figure; indeed it is the human figure that is supposed to be largely responsible for creating space.