Lot Essay
In the mid-1970s Stella's work underwent an important development. His earlier canvases were flat and geometric. But he then changed direction, devising two series of engineered constructions--the Exotic Birds and the Indian Birds--which demanded a revision of the standard categories of both painting and sculpture. Ram Gangra is the most significant of the Indian Bird series.
The extravagance which characterizes the 1970s pictures was manifest first in the Exotic Bird pictures. These were conceived in a similar fashion to the Polish Village pictures (Lots 24 and 51): first drawn as studies on graph paper, then converted to models, later manufactured as reliefs and ultimately painted. The difference was in the materials which Stella used to make the drawings. He began to employ as templates engineer's curves of several varieties--French curves, railroad curves and shipbuilder's curves--all designed to provide standard ways of joining several points on a surface with elegant, continuous lines. He bought several sets of these curves and rearranged them repeatedly on his drawing sheets before fixing on a solution: "I could make so-called relational paintings, just by sliding the templates around the surface. No need to erase, paint out or redo" (quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, New York, 1987, p. 64). He next cut the shapes in foamcore and arranged them to project from the picture surface, then manufactured them in aluminum at different scales and finished them back in the studio. This method of working allowed Stella to reorganize and to improvise at all stages of production and to retain the possibility of making several versions of each drawn image.
The Exotic Bird series consists of twenty-eight drawings and foamcore maquettes which were translated into aluminum reliefs, two reliefs from each maquette at enlargements of 3 and 5.5. Stella brought the aluminum surfaces to "life" by painting them. He has said that he learned from Picasso how to make the forms in his paintings "real": "It's so aggressively painted that it bursts out into image, and that image has a sense of being real, of breaking through pictorial boundaries to coexist in our everyday space. For me, painting these metal reliefs is a way of infusing the piece with life..." (quoted in ibid., p. 73). Stella painted the reliefs of the Exotic Birds and subsequent series with an unprecedented exuberance and extravagance. Rubin suggests that this was due in part to an increased happiness in his personal life: the reliefs were named after exotic birds and his second wife, Harriet McGurk, had introduced him to bird-watching.
The Exotic Bird reliefs were difficult to manufacture and took several years to complete; in the middle of the process Stella conceived and began to produce his Indian Bird series. Whereas the Exotic Birds retain a sense of the geometry that had governed Stella's work throughout his career, he was keen in the Indian Birds to experiment with figure-ground relationships and to expand the vocabulary of constructed space.
It was around this time that Stella was invited by the Sarabhai family to their home in Ahmedabad. He took with him a number of drawings and a foamcore maquette, and during his twelve-day stay made twelve additional maquettes and a duplicate set for his hosts. The drawings which he brought with him were executed on translucent paper, enabling Stella to superimpose one layer above another and to change the scale of the elements in each of the layers (figs. 1-3). When the maquettes (fig. 4) were made, he mounted one layer on a curved mesh screen and then manipulated the second layer in relation to the first. The elements for the maquettes were cut from scrap materials--often misregistered packaging--which Stella liked because it had a dramatic, flickering life of its own. Stella brought the maquettes back to New York and had them manufactured at 5.5 enlargement. Echoing the earlier Exotic Bird series, he took the titles for the finished reliefs from a book about Indian birds.
William Rubin wrote of the Indian Bird series:
In many respects, [they] represent the apotheosis of Stella's Baroque tendencies. The irregular curves that appeared in them were grander, more asymmetrically handled, larger in number, and more complex in their structural interrelationships than those of the Exotic Birds. Gone were the large straight edge fields that had provided backgrounds for the latter; there are very few straight lines in the Indian Birds, and they never contour more than fragments of the relief. The absence of a containing background, combined with the seemingly bolder angles at which the large irregular curves projected, made the visual assimilation of the Indian Birds no simple matter. Their challenge was reinforced, moreover, by a glitzy palette which...made the color schemes of the Exotic Birds seem almost classical by comparison. (Ibid., p. 84)
Stella was invited in 1983 to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. His lectures were published under the title Working Space. He wrote in the lectures in particular of Caravaggio; in many respects, his own Indian Bird reliefs can be explained in relation to his remarks about the great Italian painter:
[Caravaggio's] paintings, almost by definition, should have a spherical sense of spatial containment and enlargement--a spatial sense, obviously at odds with the boxlike mechanics most commonly and effectively used for the presentation of space. An effective painting should present its space in such a way as to include both viewer and maker each with his own space intact... The act of looking at a painting should automatically expand the sense of that painting's space, both literally and imaginatively. In other words, the spatial experience of a painting should not seem to end at the framing edges or be boxed in by the picture plane. The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane is the burden that modern painting was born with. (F. Stella, Working Space, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 9-10)
(fig. 1) Frank Stella, Drawing A for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 2) Frank Stella, Drawing B for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 3) Frank Stella, Drawing A superimposed on Drawing A for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 4) Frank Stella, Maquette for Ram Gangra, 1977
The extravagance which characterizes the 1970s pictures was manifest first in the Exotic Bird pictures. These were conceived in a similar fashion to the Polish Village pictures (Lots 24 and 51): first drawn as studies on graph paper, then converted to models, later manufactured as reliefs and ultimately painted. The difference was in the materials which Stella used to make the drawings. He began to employ as templates engineer's curves of several varieties--French curves, railroad curves and shipbuilder's curves--all designed to provide standard ways of joining several points on a surface with elegant, continuous lines. He bought several sets of these curves and rearranged them repeatedly on his drawing sheets before fixing on a solution: "I could make so-called relational paintings, just by sliding the templates around the surface. No need to erase, paint out or redo" (quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, New York, 1987, p. 64). He next cut the shapes in foamcore and arranged them to project from the picture surface, then manufactured them in aluminum at different scales and finished them back in the studio. This method of working allowed Stella to reorganize and to improvise at all stages of production and to retain the possibility of making several versions of each drawn image.
The Exotic Bird series consists of twenty-eight drawings and foamcore maquettes which were translated into aluminum reliefs, two reliefs from each maquette at enlargements of 3 and 5.5. Stella brought the aluminum surfaces to "life" by painting them. He has said that he learned from Picasso how to make the forms in his paintings "real": "It's so aggressively painted that it bursts out into image, and that image has a sense of being real, of breaking through pictorial boundaries to coexist in our everyday space. For me, painting these metal reliefs is a way of infusing the piece with life..." (quoted in ibid., p. 73). Stella painted the reliefs of the Exotic Birds and subsequent series with an unprecedented exuberance and extravagance. Rubin suggests that this was due in part to an increased happiness in his personal life: the reliefs were named after exotic birds and his second wife, Harriet McGurk, had introduced him to bird-watching.
The Exotic Bird reliefs were difficult to manufacture and took several years to complete; in the middle of the process Stella conceived and began to produce his Indian Bird series. Whereas the Exotic Birds retain a sense of the geometry that had governed Stella's work throughout his career, he was keen in the Indian Birds to experiment with figure-ground relationships and to expand the vocabulary of constructed space.
It was around this time that Stella was invited by the Sarabhai family to their home in Ahmedabad. He took with him a number of drawings and a foamcore maquette, and during his twelve-day stay made twelve additional maquettes and a duplicate set for his hosts. The drawings which he brought with him were executed on translucent paper, enabling Stella to superimpose one layer above another and to change the scale of the elements in each of the layers (figs. 1-3). When the maquettes (fig. 4) were made, he mounted one layer on a curved mesh screen and then manipulated the second layer in relation to the first. The elements for the maquettes were cut from scrap materials--often misregistered packaging--which Stella liked because it had a dramatic, flickering life of its own. Stella brought the maquettes back to New York and had them manufactured at 5.5 enlargement. Echoing the earlier Exotic Bird series, he took the titles for the finished reliefs from a book about Indian birds.
William Rubin wrote of the Indian Bird series:
In many respects, [they] represent the apotheosis of Stella's Baroque tendencies. The irregular curves that appeared in them were grander, more asymmetrically handled, larger in number, and more complex in their structural interrelationships than those of the Exotic Birds. Gone were the large straight edge fields that had provided backgrounds for the latter; there are very few straight lines in the Indian Birds, and they never contour more than fragments of the relief. The absence of a containing background, combined with the seemingly bolder angles at which the large irregular curves projected, made the visual assimilation of the Indian Birds no simple matter. Their challenge was reinforced, moreover, by a glitzy palette which...made the color schemes of the Exotic Birds seem almost classical by comparison. (Ibid., p. 84)
Stella was invited in 1983 to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. His lectures were published under the title Working Space. He wrote in the lectures in particular of Caravaggio; in many respects, his own Indian Bird reliefs can be explained in relation to his remarks about the great Italian painter:
[Caravaggio's] paintings, almost by definition, should have a spherical sense of spatial containment and enlargement--a spatial sense, obviously at odds with the boxlike mechanics most commonly and effectively used for the presentation of space. An effective painting should present its space in such a way as to include both viewer and maker each with his own space intact... The act of looking at a painting should automatically expand the sense of that painting's space, both literally and imaginatively. In other words, the spatial experience of a painting should not seem to end at the framing edges or be boxed in by the picture plane. The necessity of creating pictorial space that is capable of dissolving its own perimeter and surface plane is the burden that modern painting was born with. (F. Stella, Working Space, Cambridge, 1986, pp. 9-10)
(fig. 1) Frank Stella, Drawing A for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 2) Frank Stella, Drawing B for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 3) Frank Stella, Drawing A superimposed on Drawing A for Ram Gangra, 1977
(fig. 4) Frank Stella, Maquette for Ram Gangra, 1977