Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography.

"Then there is my noble and biographical friend," said Sir Charles Wetherell about 150 years ago, "who has added a new terror to death." Sir Charles couldn't, of course, have been talking about Sidney Guberman, the painter and, now, biographer of Frank Stella, but he could have been floating a note in a bottle for Stella, who should have been forewarned by somebody: although Guberman's Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography dishes nary a speck of dirt, it fails to make Stella the man into anything nearly as substantive as Stella the artist.

The book's subtitle, An Illustrated Biography, is an omen: it makes you suspect (at least it made me suspect) that Stella said to Guberman fold friends, the two first met at Princeton in 1955) something along the lines of, "I'm not really into a biography, but I guess it's OK if it isn't one of those tell-all books." Guberman probably answered something like, That'll be all right, because it'll also be a kind of coffee-table book, with lots of color pictures of your work." As it turns out, Guberman's book is not only as softball on Stella's life as an Entertainment Tonight interview, it's deferential on Stella's art. Take, for instance, the question of whether some of the career-starting "Black Paintings, were initially" painted in another artsier color like red. Guberman writes, "But if you take a look at Morro Castle ... you will see what Franz Fedier, a painter and teacher at the Basel Beaux-Arts and a respected critic, has seen. Beneath the black a dark red appears at the edges of the stripes. Was the picture initially in color? Red?" Is it expecting too much of a biographer to think he might have asked his living, healthy, articulate subject whether he did, in fact, first paint Morro Castle something other than black?

This kind of tiptoeing is particularly bothersome because it implies some explosive sensitivity when in fact, these days, extremely successful artists like Stella haven't usually led especially eventful lives. Having elevated themselves into small versions of industrial or publishing magnates, they live like Republicans. Their stories, such as they are, resemble '50s Technicolor biopics. There's the unassuming background (born in 1936, Stella was the son of a Massachusetts gynecologist, and was picked on in grade school as a "guinea"), the first encounter with meaningful art (a 1958 trip to New York to see a Jasper Johns show), the break with family conventions (the decision not to attend law school), the fateful visit from a Mr. Big who says, in effect, I like the way you handle your dukes, kid ("The next time Castelli visited Frank in August 1959, he took Dorothy Miller, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art") the early success (Miller's "Sixteen Americans" show of 1959, and the art-world buzz following thereon), the slump or doubt or personal crisis (Stella is weak in this department; once fired up, his engine never stalled), and, finally, maturity and deserved renown.

This is not to say that Frank Stella delivers no goods al all. All insider audience will find many fascinating tidbits. For instance, it was Walter Darby, Bannard, another Princeton chum, who, clued Stella in about notching his painting formats: "Well, if you don't want them [leftover parts of the compositions], then just take them away." The copper paint of a notable Stella period was the same fluid with which his father barnacle-proofed his boat. Ivan Karp and Leo Castelli had Stella paint "baby versions" of the copper paintings for quick sale in the thousand dollar range." Andy, Warhol commissioned Stella to do a half-dozen foot-square versions of the "Benjamin Moore" series. And the stretcher bill for the "Protractor" series came to $50,000 in 1970s money. But the larger issues of Stella's career - e.g. exactly how in hell did he get a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Fucking Art when he was just 12 years out of college!-are loosely examined. Eyewitness Guberman writes, "We took a walk in the neighborhood, then stopped for a coffee where Barbara [rose] announced that Bill Rubin, now chief curator at the Museum of Modern Art, had invited Frank to have a one-man show there in the spring of 1970. He would be thirty-four years old."

In his preface, Guberman acknowledges the help of The New Yorker stalwart John McPhee in crafting the proposal for his book. That magazine's clubby nonchalance, where big-time deals are struck casually between chinoed pals on weekends, is ladled all over this book. Consequently, after Andover and Princeton (the best chapters), crucial events take place off-page. Neither Stella nor Guberman tells us what hit the fan when Frank, Jr., told Frank, Sr., that he'd bagged law school to paint. We don't even hear about Dr. Stella again until. "Sometime in the mid 60s, Stella's father started showing up at Frank's openings." And then it's only to set the stage for Stella senior's decease in 1969, which allows Guberman to observe, with less than lyric subtlety, "His death was a blow to Frank."

If Frank Stella tells us next to nothing about the artist's relations with his father, let alone about his art and career, is there any hope that it'll talk turkey about the women in his life? (This is, after all, a biography, and since Stella never saw military combat or the inside of a tramp steamer or of a guru's cave in Nepal, what else is there to write about?) The answer is no. Stella's first love, Terry Brook, does a quick judge Crater. First wife Barbara Rose says, What Frank wanted was a blonde Smith girl with a camel hair coat and that was me,, and then shuffles off. Guberman quickly introduces Kay Bearman, who often looked after Stella's daughter. Rose would drop her off at Castelli's gallery where Bearman worked as an assistant while Rose ran errands.

It was not in Kay's nature to object to the imposition, and she became quite fond of Rachel. By 1967 Kay was handling much of Frank's business, including helping him keep track of his ever increasing flow of offers and invitations.

Then, on the very next page:

Like most geniuses [Stella] has an intensity about his work that frequently leaves little room or time for the person he is living with.... In 1969 they were formally separated, then divorced. It was a stunning blow to both of them.

Then, on the very next page:

in early 1967 he came to Philadelphia with Kay Bearman. We played some men's [tennis] doubles, watched the pros play tennis in the Spectrum, and went to a party. He was obviously comfortable and happy around Kay.... They would hold hands a lot, and Frank had a happy, goofy look.

An alert reader might be puzzled at the assertion that Stella's divorce came as a "stunning blow" to him, or that he is now happily married to Harriet McGurk with no apparent further fallout from frequently having "little room or time for the person he is living with," or that the word "genius" has been slipped so offhandedly into the text. McGurk, by the way, arrives in the book on the wings of this woman-as-chattel sentence: "A huge printing press wasn't the only wonderful new thing to come Stella's way in 1975."

When Guberman summons a small cadre of critics to shim his narrative, the book's momentum grinds to a testimonial-dinner halt. Phil Leider, a former editor of Artforum, wrote in the magazine in 1970, "It is astonishing that even as [the Irregular Polygons'] are being made the vision of a monumental decorative muralism [the Protractor, series] is taking form in the artist's mind." Lordy, the way we wrote back then! That it was considered astonishing, for an artist to have an idea about both series A and series B at the same time makes one more sympathetic to the climate today, in which art is supposed to be dedicated entirely to the Other. Those who don't sufficiently appreciate Stella's art are implicitly scolded as dumb: "Alfred Pacquement seems to have understood [the Polish Village, series'] importance better than most." Guberman even delivers a preemptive strike against any criticism of Stella's future work: Whether or not Stella's architectural projects get built, they generate a great deal of interest and discussion." So, I imagine, would Keanu Reeves'.

Indubitably a major American artist, Stella is ill-served by this edgeless biography. But the fault is not 100 percent Guberman's. For all its prescient radicality (early on), visual liveliness (circa the Protractors"), and physical bombast (recent and ongoing), Stella's work is, oddly, emotionally unsatisfying. What Guberman writes about the young Carl Andre could just as easily apply - with the substitution of "painting" for sculpture" - to Stella: "Carl Andre ... spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the next major step in sculpture would be."