and the accompanying internal relations among the parts. His work in this respect had affinities with the primary structures of some minimal artist and with the All-Over style of painting in which attention is evenly diffused over the whole canvas, leaving no outstanding points of interest brought together by balance, harmony, rhythm, and so on (Osborne 521).
Until his last month at Princeton, Stella had painted in a style that was derived from de Kooning, Frankenthaler, and Kline, and he would subsequently absorb influences from Gottlieb and Motherwell. At the end of his time at Princeton he entered on a period of rapid development in which he produced compositions containing single or multiple box forms placed in varying contexts of bands or stripes. These pictures make up the bridge, or transition, to the Black series in which his profile as an independent painter was established. Many of these transitional paintings reflect Stella's excitement with the ambiance of New York City. In Coney Island, for instance, a blue rectangle floats on a field of alternating red and yellow horizontal bands. The picture was realized improvisationally and contains some of the overpainting and scumbling that Tenth Street painting had appropriated from de Kooning, but the picture's suspended rectangle showed Stella's interest in the more simple and geometrically organized compositions of the post-1949 Rothko. In Astoria it is possible to see a stage beyond Coney Island, for in this work the geometrical forms have been overpainted to produce a design made up entirely of horizontal bands (Rubin 10).
In his early work, Stella was a practitioner of minimalism. Minimalism gained a foothold in the visual arts of painting and sculpture in the 1960's, standing as a formal strike against symbolism, narrative, and didactic works with blaring undertones of cultural and political commentary. Minimalists create abstract forms using fundamental shapes...