Frank Stella & Donald Judd - interviewed by Bruce Glaser (1966)

This discussion was broadcast on WBAI-FM, New York, February, 1964, as “New Nihilism or New Art?” It was one of a series of programs produced by Bruce Glaser. Glaser has lectured on art at Hunter College and Pratt Institute, and is now the director of the Art Gallery of the America Israel Cultural Foundation in New York City.

The material of the broadcast was subsequently edited by Lucy R. Lippard, and was published in Art News, September, 1966. In her introduction to the text, Miss Lippard wrote that it contains “the first extensive published statement by Frank Stella, a widely acknowledged source of much current structural painting, and Donald Judd, one of the earliest exponents of the sculptural primary structure, in which the artists themselves challenge and clarify the numerous prevailing generalizations about their work.”

BRUCE GLASER: There are characteristics in your work that bring to mind styles from the early part of this century. Is it fair to say that the relative simplicity of Malevich, the Constructivists, Mondrian, the Neo-Plasticists, and the Purists is a precedent for your painting and sculpture, or are you really departing from these earlier movements?

FRANK STELLA: There’s always been a trend toward simpler painting and it was bound to happen one way or another. Whenever painting gets complicated, like Abstract Expressionism, or Surrealism, there’s going to be someone who’s not painting complicated paintings, someone who’s trying to simplify.

GLASER: But all through the twentieth century this simple approach has paralleled more complicated styles.

STELLA: That’s right, but it’s not continuous. When I first showed, Coates in The New Yorker said how sad it was to find somebody so young right back where Mondrian was thirty years ago. And I really didn't feel that way.

GLASER: You feel there’s no connection between you and Mondrian?

STELLA: There are obvious connections. You’re always related to something. I'm related to the more geometric, or simpler, painting, but the motivation doesn't have anything to do with that kind of European geometric painting. I think the obvious comparison with my work would be Vasarely, and I can’t think of anything I like less.

GLASER: Vasarely?

STELLA: Well, mine has less illusionism than Vasarely’s, but the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel actually painted all the patterns before I did - all the basic designs that are in my painting - not the way I did it, but you can find the schemes of the sketches I made for my own paintings in work by Vasarely and that group in France over the last seven or eight years. I didn't even know about it, and in spite f the fact that they used those ideas, those basic schemes, it till doesn't have anything to do with my painting. I find all that European geometric painting - sort of post-Max Bill school - a kind of curiosity - very dreary.

DONALD JUDD: There’s an enormous break between that work and other present work in the U.S., despite similarity in patterns or anything. The scale itself is just one thing to pin down. Vasarely’s work has a smaller scale and a great deal of composition and qualities that European geometric painting of the 20’s and 30’s had. He is part of a continuous development from the 30’s, and he was doing it himself then.

Frank Stella (Painters Painting, 1972)

An extract from the 1972 documentary Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene 1940-1970, directed by Emile de Antonio