Lot Essay
Beginning in 1958 with his first mature works, the Black Paintings (1958-60), through the subsequent series of paintings, the Aluminum (1960-61), and the Copper Paintings (1962), and culminating in the Purple Paintings of 1963, Frank Stella moved swiftly and assuredly into the artworld's consciousness as he radically altered the conventions of Modernist painting.
Stella approached the topical problems of Modern painting with a fresh eye. As he told Bruce Glaser in an interview published in Artnews in 1966:
I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting--the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there...All I ever 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 (B. Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Artnews, September 1966, pp. 55-61).
The Black Paintings were radical in their monastic purity. The Aluminum and Copper series, while retaining the monochrome purity of the Black Paintings, introduced shaped canvases, where the outside edge of the painting provided the structure for the interior design of the stripes. In the Purple Paintings, Stella pushed the shaped canvas further than the previous two series, making the internal design of the Purple Paintings, "so closely related to the configuration of the framing edge (or the central void) that the container and the thing contained became inseparable, each being a direct function of the other...the bones and the flesh of the painting were united" (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Baltimore 1970, p. 31).
The Purple Paintings also introduced color as an important, expressive element for the first time in the series of stripe paintings. As William Rubin has written:
Stella's development from the Black through the Purple series impresses one in retrospect by the taut step-by-step logic with which it unfolds... In the latter half of 1963... [Stella] returned to the shaped canvas with a vengeance... Whatever the motivation behind the choice of the metallic purple, that color played a much greater expressive role than did the aluminum and copper anti-colors of the earlier shaped canvases. Thus, though the shaped formats of the Purple pictures mark the end of a progression implicit in the Black series and explicit in the Aluminum series, these paintings represent a new beginning in their emphasis on the affective role of color (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York 1970, pp. 84, 89).
The series following the Purple Paintings (Dartmouth; Notched V; and Running V Paintings) would explore the ground opened up by the Purple Paintings.
While, "the overriding effect of Stella's work continues to affirm his unswerving faith in the absolute autonomy of art and of abstraction as the only viable language," (R. Rosenblum "Introduction", Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, New York 1986, p. 23), other more personal referents are being recognized with the passage of time. Each of the eight paintings of the Purple series was a distinct geometric form--triangle, square, trapezoid, parallelogram, and penta-, hecta-, octa-, and decagons--named for a friend of Stella's. The trapezoid- shaped Ileana Sonnabend, the largest painting in the Purple series, is named after the art dealer and former wife of Leo Castelli, whose "portrait" in the series is a smaller equilateral triangle. While Stella has never publicly explained the reasons for the choice of name and shape in the series, their two portraits might be fitted together, the triangle on top of the trapezoid, to form a larger equilateral triangle, that would symbolize the personal connection between the young painter's two dealers.
Stella approached the topical problems of Modern painting with a fresh eye. As he told Bruce Glaser in an interview published in Artnews in 1966:
I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting--the humanistic values that they always find on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there...All I ever 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 (B. Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Artnews, September 1966, pp. 55-61).
The Black Paintings were radical in their monastic purity. The Aluminum and Copper series, while retaining the monochrome purity of the Black Paintings, introduced shaped canvases, where the outside edge of the painting provided the structure for the interior design of the stripes. In the Purple Paintings, Stella pushed the shaped canvas further than the previous two series, making the internal design of the Purple Paintings, "so closely related to the configuration of the framing edge (or the central void) that the container and the thing contained became inseparable, each being a direct function of the other...the bones and the flesh of the painting were united" (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Baltimore 1970, p. 31).
The Purple Paintings also introduced color as an important, expressive element for the first time in the series of stripe paintings. As William Rubin has written:
Stella's development from the Black through the Purple series impresses one in retrospect by the taut step-by-step logic with which it unfolds... In the latter half of 1963... [Stella] returned to the shaped canvas with a vengeance... Whatever the motivation behind the choice of the metallic purple, that color played a much greater expressive role than did the aluminum and copper anti-colors of the earlier shaped canvases. Thus, though the shaped formats of the Purple pictures mark the end of a progression implicit in the Black series and explicit in the Aluminum series, these paintings represent a new beginning in their emphasis on the affective role of color (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York 1970, pp. 84, 89).
The series following the Purple Paintings (Dartmouth; Notched V; and Running V Paintings) would explore the ground opened up by the Purple Paintings.
While, "the overriding effect of Stella's work continues to affirm his unswerving faith in the absolute autonomy of art and of abstraction as the only viable language," (R. Rosenblum "Introduction", Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965, New York 1986, p. 23), other more personal referents are being recognized with the passage of time. Each of the eight paintings of the Purple series was a distinct geometric form--triangle, square, trapezoid, parallelogram, and penta-, hecta-, octa-, and decagons--named for a friend of Stella's. The trapezoid- shaped Ileana Sonnabend, the largest painting in the Purple series, is named after the art dealer and former wife of Leo Castelli, whose "portrait" in the series is a smaller equilateral triangle. While Stella has never publicly explained the reasons for the choice of name and shape in the series, their two portraits might be fitted together, the triangle on top of the trapezoid, to form a larger equilateral triangle, that would symbolize the personal connection between the young painter's two dealers.