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Lot Essay
Promoting a pointed but ever-evolving vision for the future of abstract painting, Frank Stella’s oeuvre exists between the emotional charge of Abstract Expressionism and the ordered exactitude of Minimalism. Harnessing not just the application of paint on canvas, but also the very support itself, Itata is the result of an artist working at the boundaries of traditional painting in the twentieth century. Formerly in the collection of the legendary Modernist architect and art patron Philip Johnson, the present work display's Stella's overriding drive for creativity. Speaking about this compunction, the artist noted, “After all the aim of art is to create space—space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live” (quoted in, S. Everett, Art Theory and Criticism: An Anthology of Formalist, Avant-Garde, Contextualist and Post-Modern Thought, New York, 1995, p. 246). By reducing his works down to a programmatic series of even stripes inspired by the very width of his brush, Stella created a one-to-one correlation between the physicality of the work and the resulting piece. Though seemingly autonomous, the viewer is actually witnessing large, even brushstrokes that methodically trace the very hand of the artist.
Itata comes from Stella’s dynamic Notched-V series of paintings which incorporated several V-shapes abutted to each other. Named after historic ships, themselves christened with names found in nature, works from this suite exhibit a reserved palette of earthen shades. Itata takes this connection to the physical realm more literally, as Stella painted with a metallic powder mixed into a polymer emulsion. The resulting tones are those of industrial elements. The left segment is a steely gray with all the cold shimmer of a steamship while the right portion is painted in a rusty iron red-brown. The duality of coolness and warmth serves as a visual and atmospheric balance within the work while also referencing his Aluminum and Copper paintings of the preceding years. Stella’s trademark use of bare canvas to separate his bands of color creates an optical undulation that pushes up and down at the same time.
The artist remarked a few years after finishing this work: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he’s doing. He is making a thing... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion... What you see is what you see” (quoted in B. Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News, September, 1966, p. 6). The painting is self-contained and we are witness to its internal energy. Just as it pushes, it pulls; as it cools, it heats up. Itata is a powerful example of the potential energy inherent in Stella’s shaped canvases.
Stella began studying art history and painting in 1950, continuing his studies at Princeton before graduating in 1958. During this time, he came to the realization that his interests lay beyond representational painting. Initially working in the gestural style of the New York School, a visit to Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition cemented an idea in Stella’s mind: that painting should be what it appeared to be. Robert Rosenblum remarked, “The overriding effect of Stella’s work continues to affirm his unswerving faith in the absolute autonomy of art and in abstraction as the only viable language” (quoted in L. Rubin, Frank Stella Paintings 1958 to 1965: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1986, p. 23). Stella maintained that abstraction was the only way forward, and that his generation of painters were some of the first to exist where this notion could be held as true. By paring his practice down to the bare elements and essentially clearing the burden of emotional or representative nuance, his canvases became forthright and irrefutably about painting itself.
As an artist, Stella’s trajectory traces the path of 20th-century painting into the future. Touchstones throughout his oeuvre have served as evolutionary markers in the history of abstraction. His Black Paintings, first shown in 1959, set the stage for a career-long investigation that the artist continues to this day. Rosenblum, speaking in 1970, noted, “One constant, at least, of this decade is the importance of the Black Paintings as epochal art history; for now, like then, they retain the watershed quality so apparent when they were first seen in 1959. Today too they have the character of a willful and successful manifesto that would wipe out the past of art and that would establish the foundation stones for a new kind of art” (quoted in S. Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography, New York, 1995, p. 46). He may well have replaced “decade” with “century,” as the hard lines and shaped canvases that Stella produced have been the proverbial seed for myriad young artists in the years since. Though his paintings became more lyrical and colorful as the years progressed, the artist has never lost his connection to the actual making of the work and the quest for innovation. Eschewing the traditional rectilinear format in favor of a convergence of line, color, and shape in perfect harmony, works like Itata make it hard to speak about paintings as something divorced from our own physical world.
Itata comes from Stella’s dynamic Notched-V series of paintings which incorporated several V-shapes abutted to each other. Named after historic ships, themselves christened with names found in nature, works from this suite exhibit a reserved palette of earthen shades. Itata takes this connection to the physical realm more literally, as Stella painted with a metallic powder mixed into a polymer emulsion. The resulting tones are those of industrial elements. The left segment is a steely gray with all the cold shimmer of a steamship while the right portion is painted in a rusty iron red-brown. The duality of coolness and warmth serves as a visual and atmospheric balance within the work while also referencing his Aluminum and Copper paintings of the preceding years. Stella’s trademark use of bare canvas to separate his bands of color creates an optical undulation that pushes up and down at the same time.
The artist remarked a few years after finishing this work: “My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he’s doing. He is making a thing... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion... What you see is what you see” (quoted in B. Glaser, “Questions to Stella and Judd,” Art News, September, 1966, p. 6). The painting is self-contained and we are witness to its internal energy. Just as it pushes, it pulls; as it cools, it heats up. Itata is a powerful example of the potential energy inherent in Stella’s shaped canvases.
Stella began studying art history and painting in 1950, continuing his studies at Princeton before graduating in 1958. During this time, he came to the realization that his interests lay beyond representational painting. Initially working in the gestural style of the New York School, a visit to Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition cemented an idea in Stella’s mind: that painting should be what it appeared to be. Robert Rosenblum remarked, “The overriding effect of Stella’s work continues to affirm his unswerving faith in the absolute autonomy of art and in abstraction as the only viable language” (quoted in L. Rubin, Frank Stella Paintings 1958 to 1965: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1986, p. 23). Stella maintained that abstraction was the only way forward, and that his generation of painters were some of the first to exist where this notion could be held as true. By paring his practice down to the bare elements and essentially clearing the burden of emotional or representative nuance, his canvases became forthright and irrefutably about painting itself.
As an artist, Stella’s trajectory traces the path of 20th-century painting into the future. Touchstones throughout his oeuvre have served as evolutionary markers in the history of abstraction. His Black Paintings, first shown in 1959, set the stage for a career-long investigation that the artist continues to this day. Rosenblum, speaking in 1970, noted, “One constant, at least, of this decade is the importance of the Black Paintings as epochal art history; for now, like then, they retain the watershed quality so apparent when they were first seen in 1959. Today too they have the character of a willful and successful manifesto that would wipe out the past of art and that would establish the foundation stones for a new kind of art” (quoted in S. Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography, New York, 1995, p. 46). He may well have replaced “decade” with “century,” as the hard lines and shaped canvases that Stella produced have been the proverbial seed for myriad young artists in the years since. Though his paintings became more lyrical and colorful as the years progressed, the artist has never lost his connection to the actual making of the work and the quest for innovation. Eschewing the traditional rectilinear format in favor of a convergence of line, color, and shape in perfect harmony, works like Itata make it hard to speak about paintings as something divorced from our own physical world.