Lot Essay
Between 1959 and 1966 Frank Stella developed a group of paintings characterized by bands of pigment separated by thin stripes, sometimes of color and often of bare canvas. These paintings stretched and twisted the basic format of the Black paintings in an astonishing variety of ways: the stretchers were punctured; made in non-traditional geometric shapes, sometimes with segments cut out; and painted in metallic pigments or brilliant housepaints. In 1964 and 1965 the stretchers follow huge zig-zagging paths, some as large as almost 25 feet in width.
The next group of pictures, of which Tuftonboro is one, broke still more dramatically with the format of Stella's earlier works. Composed of eccentrically shaped polygons, they are characterized by openness, irregularity and illusionism. This Irregular Polygon series consists of fourty-four shaped canvases named after towns in New Hampshire. Stella made his Irregular Polygons from eleven different geometric shapes, using each as the basis for four canvases. Each of the four canvases in a given group is distinguished from the others by a different use of color. The spatial complexity of the Irregular Polygons comes from our ability to read areas of the canvas ambiguously.
Stella said his concern in paintings like Tuftonboro was to define the decorative in painting:
My main interest has been to make what is popularly called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms. Decorative, that is in a good sense, in the sense that it is applied to Matisse... Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. (W. Rubin, op. cit., p. 149)
Robert Rosenblum compares the Irregular Polygons to the intricate serial variations of Jasper Johns's 0-9 lithographs, in which all the prints were made in different inks from the same stone. And he describes their extravagance at length:
...[the] unpredictable components of this fantastic plane geometry, where the seeming exercise of mathematical reason is thoroughly contradicted by the thrusting pressures of deadlock and release that almost make the spectator feel as if watching a passionate battle staged by a crazy geometer. (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 44)
He concludes that these pictures disprove the simplistic distinction which critics frequently make between the fervent, spontaneous 1950s and the cold, calculated 1960s. Rosenblum suggests that Stella, in the present series, succeeds in being both passionate and decorative. According to Rosenblum:
Stella's works, for all their seeming impersonality, are charged with intensely personal energies that are all the more potent for being so rigorously disciplined. The Eccentric Polygon series of 1966 compels us, in as kinesthetically contagious a way as Pollock and Kline, to participate in a field of gigantic forces where acute angles create painful pressure points and where open fields try to pry themselves free of locked enclosures. (Ibid., p. 47)
The next group of pictures, of which Tuftonboro is one, broke still more dramatically with the format of Stella's earlier works. Composed of eccentrically shaped polygons, they are characterized by openness, irregularity and illusionism. This Irregular Polygon series consists of fourty-four shaped canvases named after towns in New Hampshire. Stella made his Irregular Polygons from eleven different geometric shapes, using each as the basis for four canvases. Each of the four canvases in a given group is distinguished from the others by a different use of color. The spatial complexity of the Irregular Polygons comes from our ability to read areas of the canvas ambiguously.
Stella said his concern in paintings like Tuftonboro was to define the decorative in painting:
My main interest has been to make what is popularly called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms. Decorative, that is in a good sense, in the sense that it is applied to Matisse... Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. (W. Rubin, op. cit., p. 149)
Robert Rosenblum compares the Irregular Polygons to the intricate serial variations of Jasper Johns's 0-9 lithographs, in which all the prints were made in different inks from the same stone. And he describes their extravagance at length:
...[the] unpredictable components of this fantastic plane geometry, where the seeming exercise of mathematical reason is thoroughly contradicted by the thrusting pressures of deadlock and release that almost make the spectator feel as if watching a passionate battle staged by a crazy geometer. (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 44)
He concludes that these pictures disprove the simplistic distinction which critics frequently make between the fervent, spontaneous 1950s and the cold, calculated 1960s. Rosenblum suggests that Stella, in the present series, succeeds in being both passionate and decorative. According to Rosenblum:
Stella's works, for all their seeming impersonality, are charged with intensely personal energies that are all the more potent for being so rigorously disciplined. The Eccentric Polygon series of 1966 compels us, in as kinesthetically contagious a way as Pollock and Kline, to participate in a field of gigantic forces where acute angles create painful pressure points and where open fields try to pry themselves free of locked enclosures. (Ibid., p. 47)