Lot Essay
Pratfall is one of two large grisaille paintings from the Diderot series. A subset of the Concentric Square paintings which Frank Stella painted periodically from 1962 through 1978, the Diderot paintings are generally acknowledged as the most successful group of the artist's sixteen-year-long investigation of this format.
The Concentric format provided fertile ground for experimentation in color and value relationships for Stella. All of the Concentric pictures are either squares or composed of two squares placed horizontally next to one another. The paintings consist of concentric bands of paint which are parallel to the edge of the canvas, and the number of bands plus the unpainted interstices determine the size of the painting. The format provides the parameters for the making of the painting, eliminating all 'compositional' decisions, and allows Stella to concentrate on pure painting concerns of color and value relationships. The stepped gradations of these paintings seemed to imply complex spatial movement for the first time in Stella's painting. This is especially evident in the value paintings like Pratfall, where the design is most clear and rational, suggestive of a ziggurat shape.
Stella himself has said, 'The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect--almost a numbing power--became a sort of 'control' against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured' (W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, New York 1987, p. 48).
The Diderot paintings are the largest of the Concentrics, with the biggest one measuring nearly twelve-by-twenty-four feet. Their sheer size allowed Stella to expand the number of bands on each picture, since the width of the bands remained the same as on a considerably smaller picture. The expanded number of bands allowed a more graduated sequence of color, or as in Pratfall, of value, than heretofore possible. While being no less rigorous in their logic or execution than any of Stella's series from the 1960s, the expanded field of the Diderot pictures seemed to indicate a distinct moving away from the reductiveness for which the artist was famous, and a hint of the radical change that would take place in his work beginning with the Brazilian paintings on shaped and constructed metal in 1974--the same year as Pratfall--and would carry through today.
Pratfall was installed in the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, October 1983, to honor Frank Stella's appointment as Charles Eliot Norton lecturer.
The Concentric format provided fertile ground for experimentation in color and value relationships for Stella. All of the Concentric pictures are either squares or composed of two squares placed horizontally next to one another. The paintings consist of concentric bands of paint which are parallel to the edge of the canvas, and the number of bands plus the unpainted interstices determine the size of the painting. The format provides the parameters for the making of the painting, eliminating all 'compositional' decisions, and allows Stella to concentrate on pure painting concerns of color and value relationships. The stepped gradations of these paintings seemed to imply complex spatial movement for the first time in Stella's painting. This is especially evident in the value paintings like Pratfall, where the design is most clear and rational, suggestive of a ziggurat shape.
Stella himself has said, 'The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect--almost a numbing power--became a sort of 'control' against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured' (W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, New York 1987, p. 48).
The Diderot paintings are the largest of the Concentrics, with the biggest one measuring nearly twelve-by-twenty-four feet. Their sheer size allowed Stella to expand the number of bands on each picture, since the width of the bands remained the same as on a considerably smaller picture. The expanded number of bands allowed a more graduated sequence of color, or as in Pratfall, of value, than heretofore possible. While being no less rigorous in their logic or execution than any of Stella's series from the 1960s, the expanded field of the Diderot pictures seemed to indicate a distinct moving away from the reductiveness for which the artist was famous, and a hint of the radical change that would take place in his work beginning with the Brazilian paintings on shaped and constructed metal in 1974--the same year as Pratfall--and would carry through today.
Pratfall was installed in the Carpenter Center, Harvard University, Cambridge, October 1983, to honor Frank Stella's appointment as Charles Eliot Norton lecturer.