Tyler was a pivotal master printer at the forefront of the American print renaissance. Having enticed major artists of the day to his print workshops on the West and then East coasts of America, Tyler orchestrated the move from printmaking as a minor artform to a leading visual practice. The ambition was to create works on a grand scale, involving ground-breaking materials and techniques, explorations of both two and three dimensions, an emphasis on papermaking, and the adoption of a wide-ranging palette.

Lichtenstein to Warhol: The Kenneth Tyler Collection will display exceptional works from the collection by major artists active in America in the post-war period in styles from Abstraction to Pop, from Minimalism to Maximalism. Artists include Josef and Anni Albers, Helen Frankenthaler, Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Robert Rauschenberg, Donald Sultan, Andy Warhol, Frank Stella, Claes Oldenburg, Nancy Graves and David Hockney.

The exhibition not only celebrates the great riches of the collection, but marks the beginning of an exciting new program that further builds on Ken Tyler and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler’s exceptional generosity of the past. The establishment of The Kenneth E Tyler AO and Marabeth Cohen-Tyler Foundation will enable the NGA to continue maintaining an ambitious dedicated publication and exhibition program, whose most recent achievements include the shows California Cool and David Hockney: prints and their respective catalogues.

The Foundation will also continue to sponsor emerging curatorial staff, and support research and access to the collection through a variety of dynamic digital platforms. Through their immense creativity and philanthropy, the Tylers have created a lasting legacy for both the NGA and Australia.

Lichtenstein to Warhol: The Kenneth Tyler Collection Exhibition
7 September 2019 – 9 March 2020
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au

Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, outer suburban Boston. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in history from Princeton University in New Jersey in 1958, then moved to New York. ‘I never really wanted to become an artist. But, I did want to make things’, he confessed in a conversation with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Adam D Weinberg on 7 March 2014, and an interest in contemporary events followed. Like many young artists in immediate postwar America, he was initially smitten with artists associated with Abstract Expressionism. Unlike other young artists, though, he achieved almost instant notoriety soon after graduating when, in 1959, he astonished the art world with the sombre, pure forms of his Black paintings, heralding the arrival of minimalism. Stella’s career, however, followed an unexpected trajectory in his search to validate and renew abstraction, finding new imagery that not only embraces shape, space and colour but also, to the surprise of many, decoration.

In a series of lectures at Harvard in the first half of the 1980s, Stella drew parallels between the ‘tepid’ Renaissance of Nicholas Poussin, which necessarily led to Baroque art, and the crisis of postwar abstraction, which he thought also needed to find a new impetus to retain its pre-eminence in the ever-changing world of modern art. The desire to avoid an art style he likened to a ‘slug of lead’, referring to the High Renaissance artist Poussin, and, instead, find a passion to ‘fill the void’, as Caravaggio had done, took Stella on a journey of remarkable invention. In his search for this new path for abstraction, he experimented with highly dramatic and almost narrative forms from the late 1950s onward.

The survival of abstraction in a viable form was important for Stella, but the divergent extremes of his evolving body of work left many of his early enthusiasts shaking their heads as he travelled from understated geometric forms to a fully blown Baroque style with a suggestive, dramatic expression and an enveloping sense of space. Early on, he had rebelled against the perception that he had been instrumental in introducing a minimalist language, and his career was characterised by a reaction against this unwanted mantle of purity.

Yet, there is consistency in Stella’s work. An underlying ‘spring-loaded’ tension and dynamism has always characterised it, from the early Black paintings of his youth to the more off-the-wall extravaganzas of recent years. His art chronicles a lifetime of experimenting with abstraction, and it is this narrative that was the underlying current of his major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of Art in 2015.

ut some critics still considered his later contributions a total lapse of taste. Ben Davis, in his review for artnet on 3 November 2015, agreed with critics who ‘don’t much like the swollen theatrics of Stella’s late works’. These ‘late monsters’, for Davis, took up far too much space, were too adventurous and far too dramatic, although he also conceded that the casual art viewer might well find them more to their liking. Jason Farago, on the other hand, recognises Stella as an artist who continues to explore new ideas, untrammelled by his earlier success. In his review in the Guardian of 29 October 2015, he writes that it is Stella’s ‘boundless and commendable evolution, rather than some static mastery, that is the mark of Stella’s seriousness’.

The criticism that Stella should have moved to parlour-sized works in a more conventional form failed to appreciate the bravura of an artist still intent on seeking new ways to give life to the art of abstraction. It’s this exploration that the Frank Stella: Saving abstraction exhibition will present for audiences to discover.
Jane Kinsman
Extract from Artonview, issue 87, Spring 2016

Frank Stella – The Kenneth Tyler Print Collection Exhibition
19 November 2016 – July 2017
National Gallery of Australia, Canberra
www.nga.gov.au