I’m a Stella fan who can't deny his importance but who also wouldn't want to live with most of these things. From his gigantic, early fluorescent-colored Protractor Series — one at the Whitney is 50 feet long (!) — to the late tarantula-like psychedelic-colored hyperconstructions, Stella's art doesn't have human scale; it's not really for people so much as the superorganism of art history. Or skyscraper lobbies, public spaces, the Vatican. And let's face it: Due to his wild-style sense of color, pocked lava-flow surfaces, and cacophonous compositions that look like three-dimensional maps of Pangaea, Stella's art can be really garish. So allow me to prepare Whitney viewers to be tested by this exhibition. You are going to have to deal with stringent high Minimalism and Swiftian compositional morphologies. Plus, the show is installed only quasi-chronologically, so it's difficult to simply track his development. But this survey isn't about linear progress so much as it’s about showing all the rhizome-like connections between everything Stella has done. The same ideas are almost always in play. Still, the later work will have many thinking that these things are only painted scrap metal, while the early, logical-looking hard-edged work will make many others wonder if they aren't just geometric illustrations and diagrams that anyone could make. Just math. Finally, the show as a whole might also leave people wondering if anything abstract blown up this big and made this colorful might command momentary attention. My advice: Embrace the paradoxes, go with the flow, see if you can find the cosmic through line that allows you to see why Minimalism is so important and why the artist who helped fashion it went so far in a seemingly contradictory direction to pursue all of its implications.
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