Art: The Grand Maximalist

Frank Stella is 51 this year, too old to be a prodigy but still young for an artist, and his second retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City -- consisting of work done since 1970, the year of his first one -- has just opened. He is one of the very few American artists to get this double crown in their lifetime, thanks to the enthusiasm with which William Rubin, MOMA's director of painting and sculpture, views his work. It is hardly an exaggeration that MOMA treats Stella as Jackson Pollock's true dauphin in the lineage of...