Die Fahne Hoch! (Frank Stella)

Black stripes of equal width, painted in commercial enamel on bare canvas, with thin lines of raw canvas left between them. That is the whole painting, and Stella meant it that way: his remark "What you see is what you see" is still quoted as a motto for the Minimalists who followed. Stand close and look at those unpainted gaps. They are the drawing, and they make plain that there is no picture hiding behind the pattern. It belongs to the Black Paintings of 1958 to 1960 and is in the Whitney Museum of American Art's collection in New York, though it is not currently on view. It predates Minimalism proper, but this is where the plain question these works ask, what exactly is in front of me, begins.