Frank Stella’s Die Fahne Hoch! - Formal Analysis
- Claire Fingerhut
- Nov 18
- 5 min read
Frank Stella’s Die Fahne hoch! is a 121 ⅝ in x 72 13/16 in enamel painting on canvas created in 1959. Currently, this painting is kept in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. This painting was made when Stella was 22 and newly living in New York, and was created as part of a series of several black paintings done with enamel paint on canvas. The negative space in these works is the bare canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! and the series of works it is a part of was a significant influence on the Minimalist movement. While this painting has a few possible interpretations, I believe it may not have any deeper meaning at all than Frank Stella marking a canvas in a way he found appealing.
Die Fahne hoch! is a vertical painting that uses only black enamel paint on top of the canvas. Most of the image is covered in black, with uniformly thin, evenly spaced stripes of bare canvas in between the black. In the center of the painting, the thin lines of canvas make up a cross that begins in the very center and extends to the borders. Each quadrant is made up of right-angle stripes that replicate the lines and angles of the center cross, and all extend to the edge of the image, each consecutive shape moving closer to the four corners. Each line tapers thinner as it reaches the top and bottom of the image, appearing to fade into the black. The canvas stripes, being so narrow, give the impression of the black bleeding into them, which creates an illusion of a subtle blue tone to the lines. The graphic image is symmetrical, horizontally and vertically. The depth of the black appears to make the work difficult to photograph, as it has slight differences in its color and the brightness of the canvas stripes in each image online.
The painting has a daunting, grim quality to it. The only hint of lightness, the bare canvas, is dominated and overpowered by the overwhelming black. The uniformity and even spacing of the lines give the impression of extreme organization, and when paired with the grim, cold quality of the colors, evokes a feeling of oppressive power. The size of the painting in person also must add to the feeling of intimidation, but I did not experience it in person myself.
In the documentation of the painting on the Whitney Museum’s website, the blurb about the work mentions that the title, Die Fahne hoch!, translates to “hoist the flag” in German, which is from the Nazi’s marching anthem, “Horst Wessel Song”. This connection, in addition to the verticality of the painting, could yield an interpretation of referencing Nazi banners and the malevolence of the Holocaust. The slivers of bare canvas beneath the strength of the black could represent a lack of space outside of Nazi oppression, as has been a technique seen in post-war German art, but Stella is an American artist of Italian descent, where that context might not quite fit. This piece has some qualities that remind me of a very impactful painting for me that I learned about many years ago, Anselm Kiefer’s Sulamith. Kiefer’s piece uses heavy black and thin light lines as brick grout. This piece evokes the feeling of mass loss, with the large space depicted being empty, and it shows the space covered in ash from the mass corpse burning during the Holocaust. I saw that piece in person at SFMoMA before I learned the story behind it, and it was huge, imposing, and stunning, much like how I imagine Die Fahne hoch! to be. I feel that Sulamith includes some similar formal qualities to Die Fahne hoch!, and it has a strong connection to Germany’s post-war grief, which is not quite the case for Frank Stella.
Frank Stella notably said, “what you see is what you see”, which in this case could insist upon there being no deeper subject matter to the painting, or could also imply that the viewer will create the story out of their own biases and interpretations. So, assuming there might be no deeper intention of referencing Nazis or the Holocaust, that is not an interpretation I will declare as the objective meaning. Even if the purpose of the work for Stella might have been just about creating a geometric pattern with an interesting color palette, the painting still feels very effectively overpowering and intimidating. If Stella’s intention was about the viewing experience, I am reminded of visiting Rothko’s black paintings that he created for his chapel in Houston, Texas. Those paintings are massive and take up the entire wall. They are made up of extreme, dimensional, dark purples and blacks, and tower far above the viewer’s eyeline. Being Rothko’s work though, the experience of the paintings is spiritual, and in a way, they feel like a vacuum for the viewer to fill. Those works were made toward the end of his life and after he had begun suffering medical complications. These paintings, being created during a dark period of Rothko’s life, and especially being created to hang in the chapel as a vessel for spiritual contemplation, have a lot of depth behind their creation, and their viewing experience as well. I wonder how much Stella considered his own works to be about the viewing experience, if not about a deeper story, if the scale and intensity of the black was meant for the experience of the viewer in person. Maybe to him, that is what “what you see is what you see” is about. It could be about the person standing in front of it, taking it in, or it could be about nothing at all.
I was drawn to this work as an artist myself who enjoys heavy use of dark colors and creating geometric, abstract art. I feel that art can have no hidden meaning at all and can come purely from a desire to put anything onto a canvas or page and have it be a meaningful mark of the creator’s mind and existence, consciously or not. So, interpreting Stella’s quote to mean that he puts down paint onto a canvas and it does not have to mean anything more than that, I can personally relate and accept that as his reason to create. I found it to be particularly interesting that I felt personally drawn to this work even before knowing that the philosophy behind his art is that it is nothing beyond what is observable, and that is an incredibly rare idea in the fine art world, which I greatly appreciate.
