In March 1970, a major retrospective exhibition opened at the Museum of Modern Art. The artist, Frank Stella, was then thirty-four, which may seem unremarkable today, when the work of unfledged recent art-school graduates is routinely exhibited, but was astonishingly young in a era when painters and sculptors were supposed to spend decades maturing and honing their efforts before presenting them to the public. (Only Helen Frankenthaler, just thirty-one when her retrospective at the Jewish Museum opened in January 1960, outdid Stella for precocity.) A second Stella survey, beginning where the 1970 show ended, was held at MOMA in the fall of 1987. Now “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” at the Whitney Museum of American Art presents, for the first time in America, a complete overview of this protean artist’s extraordinary six decades of exploration and innovation.1 Organized by Michael Auping, the chief curator of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and Adam D. Weinberg, the Alice P. Brown Director, Whitney Museum of American Art, with the Whitney Museum Assistant Curator, Carrie Springer, and the intense participation of the artist, the exhibition ranges from startlingly pared-down, roughly brushed stripe paintings made in 1958 to recent mixed-media, technologically sophisticated constructions that explode off the walls, to free-standing sculptures completed last year. The selection surveys about twenty-five of the approximately fifty series Stella has made, with at least one and usually two or three examples of each, most at a monumental scale.

The first works we encounter on