Lot Essay
Painted in 1958, Green Grate is one of the first works executed by Stella after he was graduated from Princeton University. This group of paintings, identified by Lawrence Rubin as the Pre-Black Paintings, are considered the artist's earliest mature work.
The summer after finishing school, Stella moved to a ground floor studio on the lower East side where he painted houses part-time for income and made art. Calvin Tomkins described a new development that took place in Stella's work after he had seen Jasper Johns' first one- man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in January of 1958.
What struck Stella was Johns' method of organizing them
in repetitive patterns, such as alternating red and white horizontal stripes in the flag pictures. The stripes went
all the way to the edge of the canvas, so that there was
no sense of a background. These works were not really
paintings of flags - they were flags. This identification
of image and surface, which had such an immense influence
on later artists, was soon reflected in Stella's work at Princeton. That spring, he stopped painting like
Frankenthaler and Kline, and started doing canvases
divided by wide bands of color, with a block of solid placed
not in the upper left corner, as Johns' flags, but somewhere
near the center (C. Tompkins, "Profiles: The Space Around
Real Things," The New Yorker, September 10, 1984, p. 61).
The titles of the paintings from 1958 often refer to places where Stella had worked that summer (Astoria, Coney Island, Great Jones Street, etc.). This was a common practice for a number of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, particularly Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Green Grate is one of a handful of paintings from this period in which the title simultaneously refers to a representational object and the work's formal qualities. The black stripes of Green Grate foreshadowed the artist's most recognized body of work, the Black Paintings (1958-1960). Green Grate pays homage to the Abstract Expressionist painters of whom Stella had become aware through his teacher William Seitz, who had recently completed his thesis entitled "Abstract Expressionism in America." There is a personal sensibility to these paintings in contrast to the cool and severe Black Paintings. This sensitivity is apparent in the active, gestural style of the brushstrokes, the subdued mood of the palette, and the blurred and layered divisions of the composition.
In the months which followed, Stella continued to simplify his painting until color was completely absent and the composition's only reference was to the work itself. It was soon afterwards that Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art and Leo Castelli each offered the twenty-three year old Stella his first exhibitions in New York.
The summer after finishing school, Stella moved to a ground floor studio on the lower East side where he painted houses part-time for income and made art. Calvin Tomkins described a new development that took place in Stella's work after he had seen Jasper Johns' first one- man exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in January of 1958.
What struck Stella was Johns' method of organizing them
in repetitive patterns, such as alternating red and white horizontal stripes in the flag pictures. The stripes went
all the way to the edge of the canvas, so that there was
no sense of a background. These works were not really
paintings of flags - they were flags. This identification
of image and surface, which had such an immense influence
on later artists, was soon reflected in Stella's work at Princeton. That spring, he stopped painting like
Frankenthaler and Kline, and started doing canvases
divided by wide bands of color, with a block of solid placed
not in the upper left corner, as Johns' flags, but somewhere
near the center (C. Tompkins, "Profiles: The Space Around
Real Things," The New Yorker, September 10, 1984, p. 61).
The titles of the paintings from 1958 often refer to places where Stella had worked that summer (Astoria, Coney Island, Great Jones Street, etc.). This was a common practice for a number of his Abstract Expressionist predecessors, particularly Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock.
Green Grate is one of a handful of paintings from this period in which the title simultaneously refers to a representational object and the work's formal qualities. The black stripes of Green Grate foreshadowed the artist's most recognized body of work, the Black Paintings (1958-1960). Green Grate pays homage to the Abstract Expressionist painters of whom Stella had become aware through his teacher William Seitz, who had recently completed his thesis entitled "Abstract Expressionism in America." There is a personal sensibility to these paintings in contrast to the cool and severe Black Paintings. This sensitivity is apparent in the active, gestural style of the brushstrokes, the subdued mood of the palette, and the blurred and layered divisions of the composition.
In the months which followed, Stella continued to simplify his painting until color was completely absent and the composition's only reference was to the work itself. It was soon afterwards that Dorothy Miller of the Museum of Modern Art and Leo Castelli each offered the twenty-three year old Stella his first exhibitions in New York.