Frank Stella vs. Dana Schutz: Coolness and Passion in Art

Introduction: Two Paintings, Two Philosophies

Frank Stella's massive 1967 painting Harran 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 color 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 carries 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 — only 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 that suggests the two protagonists' angry, conflicted motions.

Frank Stella and the Aesthetic of Cool Abstraction

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 those of other Abstract Expressionists.¹ They were immediately well-received by critics of the era and set the tone for Stella's later works, which focused on the use of color and dimension. Stella rejected the notion that art was an expression of the artist's inner life 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, stating that his paintings were simply about the principles of "line, plane, volume, and point, within space" and "color, shape, and composition."²

Dana Schutz and the Narrative Power of Cubist-Futurism

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 — though not necessarily linear in nature — and are viewed by the artist herself as a direct reflection of her character. 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."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."⁴

Schutz's rise in the art world has been described as meteoric. "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."⁵ Schutz was notable for producing paintings with clear yet unsettling narratives — identifiably human yet distorted and discursive in the stories they told. According to the curator of Montreal's Musée 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."⁶

Conclusion: Geometry Versus Narrative

Beneath the surface brightness of Stella's and Schutz's work lie very different artistic philosophies — one is geometric, the other is fundamentally narrative. Despite the deconstructed shapes of both Harran II and Fight in an Elevator, Stella's work resists emotion — evident in his homage to decorative styles of painting as well as to Abstract Expressionism — while Schutz's work embraces it. Schutz's work has a backstory; Stella's does not. Schutz is inspired by human drama and form, and her use of Cubism and Futurism reveals the history of the characters she creates. Her deconstruction of shape generates motion and story, whereas Stella's resists both.