As an art historian, I have had the honor of visiting the studio-residences of various artists. Among them was Georges Braque’s Auguste Perret–designed house in Paris, with an ordered sophistication akin to the artist’s work, and, just blocks away, Henri Matisse’s preserved 1916 studio on Quai Saint-Michel, surprisingly high above the Seine and overlooking the Notre Dame Cathedral. I have been to the “working” factory and sculpture fields of David Smith at Bolton Landing in upstate New York, and to Willem de Kooning’s 1950s Manhattan studio, unexpectedly evoking in its proportions and light the sense of being in an interior by Vermeer.

Still, these and many others did not prepare me for entering Frank Stella’s enormous “country” studio in upstate New York last spring. Filled with huge constructions of differently shaped, sheets and tubes of aluminum, a first impression might be “Boeing.” Then, as Stella and I spent the day in this sports field–sized space, other responses came from the sheer density of materials, of works in different stages of realization and ranges of scale, such as a tabletop architectural model and an open sculpture construction big enough to encage a real cabin.

The “Boeing” description actually is not as far-fetched as it might initially appear to be. In 1912, Braque and Picasso, with their studios containing paper-and-string Cubist sculpture assemblies (a formal foreground for Stella’s great Polish Village reliefs), called each other “Wilbur” and “Orville,” in reference to the wings-and-wires constructions of the flying Wright brothers. And it is Picasso with whom Stella has been connected. Picasso dominated the 20th century until around 1960, with Stella’s body of work commanding attention for the next four decades. Interestingly, though, each artist created a landmark picture early, around the age of 25: Picasso (b. 1881), “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” (Museum of Modern Art, New York) and Stella (b. 1936), “Union Pacific.”

With the perspective of time and repeated experiences of the works of both artists, I posit that Stella’s achievements have exceeded those of the Cubist master. When he was in his 50s during the mid-1930s Picasso’s art had largely become a practice of “applied Cubism,” employing a vocabulary in a near-academic manner (indeed, soon taught in advanced art schools). By contrast, when Stella was the same age, he was only just beginning to fully explore complex compositions in works such as his “Cones and Pillars” series, his extraordinary commission for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto and especially his grand “Baroque” ceiling ring in that theatre.