By their expressive autism, Ireland's pieces often disclose less about themselves than about the condition in which they exist: a cultural field so charged with expectation and reference that everything seems possible in it except meaninglessness, true absurdity.
Mr. Stella's breakthrough «Black Paintings» of 1959 - 60 took the cool, impersonal geometry of Albers's earlier work and turned it into a demonstration of deliberate, aggressive meaninglessness: patterns that did nothing except cover the canvas.