The Weight of History

The NYT's review of a show of early Frank Stella gets into some interesting territory related to art historicism:

"Frank Stella 1958" suggests, completely inadvertently, that the obscurity of the [historically significant] Black Paintings may be partly their own fault. They and Mr. Stella's subsequent striped shaped paintings are the most implacable and withholding of his production and, in many ways, the least characteristic of his sensibility. They are handsome works of great historical weight, but they don't seem to have held the artist's interest for very long, so why should they hold ours? All the more reason to examine what came before the Black Paintings, to better fathom what followed them.