拍品专文
Untitled, 1959 is one of twenty-four paintings done by Frank Stella from late 1958 to early 1960 which are collectively known as the Black Paintings. These paintings, with their reductive, minimalist surfaces, their lack of gesture, and their spare, symmetrical compositions of black stripes shocked the art world when they were first seen as a group at The Museum of Modern Art's Sixteen Americans exhibition in 1959. Not only were they produced by a twenty-two year-old artist, the Black Paintings also went against the prevailing Abstract Expressionist school, and set the tone for the coming generation of Minimalist artists, like Donald Judd, Sol Lewitt and Carl Andre. They have remained as markers of what is often seen as the highpoint of post-war painting in America.
Stella came to New York immediately after graduating from Princeton in 1958. He began a series of loosely painted stripe paintings, made with cheap oil paints bought on Essex Street, but he found the "expressionist" application of paint to be unsatisfactory. Upon seeing Jasper Johns' first exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery in 1958, Stella's ideas of how to proceed changed. Johns' paintings of flags and targets were a revelation: the image of the flag determined the shape and proportions of the canvas, and filled the entire field. All decisions about composition were predetermined. The uncompromising rigor of the Black Paintings had their antecedent in Johns' cryptic paintings. The emotional content of Stella's dark and brooding works was completely overlooked by the formalist critics of the period, but subsequent analysis of titles like Tomlinson Court Park (a particularly depressing housing block in Brooklyn) or Arbeit Macht Frei (the words above the gate at Auschwitz) has shown a humanistic element to the series that only seems to enhance their dramatic effect.
The Black paintings fall into two sub-categories. In the first group, created during 1958 and through the fall of 1959, all of the bands are parallel to the edge of the canvas. Beginning in late 1959 through early 1960, the stripes are parallel to the diagonal axes of the picture. In both groups, the stripes fill the entire field. But the second group, which inherently had segements of bands that could only be completed beyond the framing edge, led directly to Stella's next innovation: the shaped canvases of the Aluminum Paintings (1960).
Stella came to New York immediately after graduating from Princeton in 1958. He began a series of loosely painted stripe paintings, made with cheap oil paints bought on Essex Street, but he found the "expressionist" application of paint to be unsatisfactory. Upon seeing Jasper Johns' first exhibition at Leo Castelli's gallery in 1958, Stella's ideas of how to proceed changed. Johns' paintings of flags and targets were a revelation: the image of the flag determined the shape and proportions of the canvas, and filled the entire field. All decisions about composition were predetermined. The uncompromising rigor of the Black Paintings had their antecedent in Johns' cryptic paintings. The emotional content of Stella's dark and brooding works was completely overlooked by the formalist critics of the period, but subsequent analysis of titles like Tomlinson Court Park (a particularly depressing housing block in Brooklyn) or Arbeit Macht Frei (the words above the gate at Auschwitz) has shown a humanistic element to the series that only seems to enhance their dramatic effect.
The Black paintings fall into two sub-categories. In the first group, created during 1958 and through the fall of 1959, all of the bands are parallel to the edge of the canvas. Beginning in late 1959 through early 1960, the stripes are parallel to the diagonal axes of the picture. In both groups, the stripes fill the entire field. But the second group, which inherently had segements of bands that could only be completed beyond the framing edge, led directly to Stella's next innovation: the shaped canvases of the Aluminum Paintings (1960).