01:00 AM EST on Thursday, March 9, 2006

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- If it's true that great suffering begets great art, then the pioneering American artist Frank Stella must have packed a lot of hurt into a very short time. How else explain 1958, a year in which the 22-year-old Stella graduated from college, moved to New York City and produced a series of paintings that not only made his reputation but changed the course of 20th-century art?

Now that remarkable 12-month span -- the art-world equivalent of an all-star rookie season -- is the focus of an exhibit and accompanying symposium at Harvard University's Arthur M. Sackler Museum.

Organized by Harry Cooper, the modern art curator at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, and Megan R. Luke, a Harvard graduate student, "Frank Stella, 1958" brings together more than 20 paintings, sculptures and other works from Stella's breakthrough year. Among them are two of Stella's early "black paintings" -- the dark, brooding, pin-striped canvases that are often credited with launching the Minimalist art movement of the 1960s and early 1970s.

One of these paintings, Morro Castle, has not been seen in the United States since the mid-1960s. (It's on loan from a Swiss museum.) Other highlights include Cricket/Kit Construction, a playful sculptural assemblage that has never been exhibited publicly before, and Blue Horizon, pastel blue stripe-painting on loan from Brown University's David Winton Bell Gallery.

The show also boasts a 140-page catalog (Yale University Press, $34.95) that examines Stella's work within the larger context of postwar American art. Meanwhile, a daylong Stella symposium is scheduled for Saturday, April 8 in the Sackler's lecture hall. (Call 617-495-2397 for information.)

Is the twentysomething Stella really worth all this fuss?

Absolutely, although the show's time-capsule format does pose some potential hurdles. For example, not everything in the show is a masterpiece or even a near-masterpiece. Some of the paintings, in fact, look just like what they are: the work of a young artist trying (not always successfully) to find his voice.

It also helps to know something about Stella and the era -- the late 1950s and early '60s -- in which he came of age.

It had to be flat

At the time, the art world was dominated by Abstract Expressionism and its imperious spokesman-in-chief, Clement Greenberg.

It was Greenberg who first called attention to the work of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionist artists. It was also Greenberg who almost single-handedly defined the terms in which postwar American art was discussed.

One of Greenberg's biggest obsessions was flatness. Indeed, it didn't seem to matter whether artists dripped (Pollock), swirled (de Kooning), stained (Mark Rothko) or soaked (Morris Louis), as long they avoided the kind of illusionistic three-dimensional space that had dominated Western painting since the Renaissance.

As Greenberg saw it, the idea that a painting was a window you looked through was out of date. Modern painting was more like a closed door -- a resolutely flat surface surrounded by a taut geometric frame.

At the same time, Abstract Expressionism itself was running out of steam. Younger artists such as Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were making art from newfangled materials such as flags and targets (Johns) and bits of recycled trash (Rauschenberg). Meanwhile, the movement's raw, paint-spattered style was beginning to look more confining than challenging.

What's amazing about Stella is how completely he absorbed these various influences even before graduating from Princeton University in June, 1958.

Look closely at the show's earliest painting, Perfect Day for Banana Fish, and you'll see hints of Rothko in the blocks of lush, airy color and of Johns in the segmented, mosaic-like design. Another Princeton painting, Tundra, follows a similar format, though in a cooler, paler key.

Enduring Minimalism

After graduation, Stella moved into a tiny studio on New York's Lower East Side. It's here that most of the show's paintings were made, and it's exciting to watch him explore approaches and ideas, discarding some while keeping others.

Stripes come and go, blocks of color expand and contract, formats switch from vertical to horizontal, color schemes shift from hot to cold. At times, the changes come so quickly it's like watching a time-lapse video.

Still, it's a bit of a shock to turn the corner and confront the group of black-striped paintings that end the exhibit. True, stripes were a part of Stella's artistic arsenal from the beginning (they have supporting roles in both Perfect Day for Banana Fish and Tundra). But there's something about these later paintings -- a kind of majestic darkness -- that's new to Stella's work.

Over the next few years, Stella continued to refine this black-on-black format, making the stripes more regular, further flattening the surface of the painting and adding new and more complex patterns.

A year after Stella's move to New York, in 1959, a group of these so-called "black paintings" was included in an exhibit at New York's Museum of Modern Art. The show cemented Stella's reputation and even caused Greenberg to revise his theories in light of the young artist's work.

More importantly, the paintings' bare-bones look helped spawn Minimalism, the movement whose less-is-more philosophy has invaded everything from art and architecture to home furnishings and office decor.

In that sense, the impact of Stella's breakthrough year is still with us.

"Frank Stella, 1958" continues through May 7 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, 485 Broadway (at Quincy Street) in Cambridge, Mass. Hours: Mon-Sat. 10-5 and Sun. 1-5. Admission: $7.50 adults, $6 student and seniors, free under 18. Phone: (617) 495-2397.