Mary Lou Loves Frank

Stella's black-striped paintings shocked the art world when they were exhibited in Dorothy Miller's Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959. Painted a year earlier, the present work belongs to a group of twenty-six paintings that led to this famous series. Certainly, the present painting is pivotal; its structure and dominant color anticipate the basic elements and format of the Black Paintings.

"Throughout these early works, it is fascinating to confront Stella's voracious cannibalizing of his elders, an Oedipal rebellion in which he claims his independence from one master and another. Motherwell, for instance, is knocked down and devoured in the brilliant, if somewhat schoolboyish ripostes of 1958 to the older master's "Je t'aime" series of the mid 1950s, Mary Lou Loves Frank and Your Lips are Blue. Here the scribbled inscriptions of Stella's titles insolently vulgarize Motherwell's fancy French and the tougher, right-angled planar divisions clean up the old master's more arty and irregular boundaries" (R. Rosenblum, "Introduction," L. Rubin, Frank Stella Paintings 1958 to 1965: A Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1986, p. 16).

(fig. 1) Robert Motherwell, Je t'aime No. 2, 1955. Private collection.