Frank Stella, "Black, Aluminum, Copper Paintings"

This show travels back to Mad Men–era New York, when a young and brash Frank Stella—who'd yet to have a one-person show—was included in MoMA's "Sixteen Americans" show of 1959, and set the art world on fire with his what-you-see-is-what-you-see canvases. The works here include some of the "Black" paintings exhibited at MoMA, as well as selections from his "Copper" and "Aluminum" series that followed. They all embody Stella's audacious proposition that a painting be stripped of everything except its own obdurate presence as a physical object, an idea that set the stage for 1960s Minimalism.