Coolness vs. Passion: Frank Stella's Abstract Designs and Dana Schutz's Narrative Frenzy of Color

Frank Stella's massive 1967 painting entitled Haran II takes the form of a geometric design that seems deceptively simple at first but becomes more and more complex as the viewer gazes upon it. The work is a series of rectangles and half-circles fused together with bright rainbows of colors embedded within them. The painting is childish in its brightness. The color palette strikes the modern viewer as very much of the 1960s and 70s with its garish orange and blue shades counterpoised against brown and red earth tones. Dana Schutz's 2015 Fight in an Elevator is similarly arresting in its brightness but in contrast to Stella's use of abstraction, Schutz's Cubist-Futurist approach has a narrative sense of form. The work depicts a swirl of fists and legs. A brown-skinned woman in high heels fights with a man in a baggy white suit but their faces are not evident, merely the conflict in which they are engaged. Stella's work is flat and deliberately one-dimensional while Schutz's is highly layered, with a busy visual field to suggest the two protagonists' angry, conflicted motions.

Frank Stella has been credited with revolutionizing Abstract Expressionism by introducing a radical new aesthetic. In 1959 his series of "coolly impersonal black striped paintings" were said to lack the "gestural brushwork and existential angst" of Jackson Pollock's works and other Abstract Expressionists.[footnoteRef:1] They were immediately well-received by critics of the era and set the tone of Stella's later works which focused on the use of color and dimension. Stella rejected the notion that art was an expression of the inner life of the artist and instead advanced the idea that paintings should be solely about form itself. He was a pioneer of nonrepresentational painting and resisted any attempts to ascribe "underlying meanings, emotions, or narratives" to his work and stated they were simply about the principles of "line, plane, volume, and point, within space" and "color, shape, and composition."[footnoteRef:2] [1: "Frank Stella," The Art Story, accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.theartstory.org/artist-stella-frank.htm] [2: Ibid.]

Dana Schutz, in contrast, gained immediate attention as an artist because of her merging of emotion and geometry in what has been called a Cubist-Futurist style. Her works are very explicitly narrative (although...

Schutz has said: "My paintings are loosely based on metanarratives. The pictures float in and out of pictorial genres. Still lifes become personified, portraits become events and landscapes become constructions."[footnoteRef:3] Schutz is interested in how humans can resemble objects and vice versa. "I embrace the area between which the subject is composed and decomposing, formed and formless, inanimate and alive."[footnoteRef:4] [3: "Dana Schutz and the Saatchi Gallery," Saatchi Gallery, 2004, accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/dana_schutz.htm] [4: Ibid.]
Schutz's rise in the art world has been described as meteoric in nature. "She shot to overnight fame in 2002. Her first solo show ... [was] of different-size canvases of high-keyed, unfixed color, depicting collapsing scenes of noses exploding, faces fracturing, figures in combat."[footnoteRef:5] Schutz was notable for having paintings with clear yet unsettling narratives that were identifiably human yet distorted and discursive in the stories they told. According to the curator of the Montreal's Musee d'Art Contemporain, where Schutz's work was recently displayed: "One of the great qualities of Dana's work is the caustic wit. It's this perfect sort of collision between hilarity and the grotesque."[footnoteRef:6] [5: Jerry Saltz, "Why have there been no women bad boy artists," Vulture, accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.vulture.com/2015/09/maddening-fate-of-the-bad-boy-female-artist.html#] [6: Julia Felsenthal, "Artsplainer: Dana Schutz's work in New York and Montreal," Vogue, October 19, 2015, accessed December 16, 2015, http://www.vogue.com/13362181/dana-schutz-artsplainer/]

Harran II is considered significant because it marked a departure from Stella's earlier, smaller, monochromatic compositions. It is one of Stella's Protractor sequence, based upon "the semicircular drafting instrument used for measuring and constructing angles."[footnoteRef:7] The paintings take their names from ancient cities located in Asia Minor and "a Roman numeral following the title indicates which of three design groups -- 'interlaces,' 'rainbows,' or 'fans' -- encompasses its surface patterning," versus any sequential order.[footnoteRef:8] Harran II is specifically "composed of a full circle formed of two vertical protractors, each of which interlocks…