拍品專文
Alfred Barr wrote that the first time he saw Stella's Black paintings he was baffled but deeply impressed by their conviction:
I found my eye, as it were, spellbound, held by a mystery... The term "perservation" seems superficially pertinent, yet the compulsiveness is controlled. To me the paintings express a stubborn, disciplined, even heroic rejection of worldly values. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 44)
William Rubin wrote in the same year that he was "almost mesmerized by their eerie, magical presence" (W. Rubin, Art International, Jan. 1960, vol. 4 (no. 1), p. 24). And Robert Rosenblum, an early teacher and champion of Stella, has said:
The Black paintings of 1959 were not born suddenly, but in fact, were the logical and patient distillation of a series of remarkable early works. In these, Stella, like many precocious young artists, did battle, as it were, with some of the major pictorial forces of the 1950s--the bold compartmented armatures of Gottlieb, the atmospheric tiers of Rothko, the heroic scale and openness of Newman... Thus, most of the values upheld by the masters of the 1950s were attacked by Stella in terms of their own grandiose dimensions. With clues taken from the refreshingly clear parallel and concentric geometries of Johns's early flags and targets, Stella managed to turn these old masters inside out... Atmospheric density, spatial overlays, discrete forms seen against grounds were all eradicated with disarming thoroughness and consistency. (R. Rosenblum, Artforum, March 1965, p. 21)
Frank Stella was twenty-three when he began the first Black paintings (fig. 1). In a very short time he had moved from significant but immature paintings that harked back to the Abstract Expressionist generation still dominant in New York to a group of paintings that were to revolutionize the direction of modern art. He described in a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1959-60 how the paintings had come about. He needed to find a solution, he explained, to the problem of composition--"what to put here and there and how to make it go with what was already there"--and his solution came with the Black paintings (quoted in R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 57). Stella said:
I had to do something about relational painting... The obvious answer was symmetry, make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth... The solution I arrived at--and there are probably quite a few, although I know of only one other, color density--forces illusionistic space out of the painting at the constant rate by using a regulated pattern. (Quoted in ibid., p. 57)
This solution obviated the need to relate one area of the canvas to another and, at the same time, pushed painting in a new direction. Stella explained it in the now famous phrase: "All I want anyone to get from my paintings, and all I ever get out of them is the fact that you can see the whole idea without confusion. What you see is what you see" (quoted in B. Glaser, ARTnews, Sept. 1966, pp. 55-61).
To execute his works, Stella employed the tools and materials of house-painting. (At that time, he was living in TriBeCa and supporting himself by working for a house painter named J. Huriash in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.) The logic was unassailable: he would use a house-painting brush to make bands the width of the brush all over his canvases according to a formula which he created to force illusionistic space out "at a constant rate."
The decision to paint in this way with simple, cheap (yet somehow expressive) materials released Stella to think about the problem of patterning. His diagram includes two sketches for the two sides of a note that says:
1. turning the
corner
2. the left over areas (Quoted in B. Richardson, exh. cat. Frank Stella: The Black Paintings, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, p. 79, 1976)
The sketches are diagrams for potential Black paintings, although neither was ever used. Stella's notes suggest a straight and logical process but other remarks which he made suggest that the path was less clear-cut. Stella describes working on a red and black painting (Delta, 1958; Collection the Artist) and recalls that something happened when he started to paint it out in black:
[I] realized I had outperformed myself. I was close to making what I wanted to, which was real painting (Quoted in J. Goldman, exh. cat. Frank Stella, Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid, 1990, p. 259).
Ellen Johnson chose Luncheon in the Grass (Location Unknown) and three Black paintings for a show at Oberlin College in May 1959, and Dorothy Miller included four Black paintings in the 16 Americans exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in December 1959. (Carl Andre wrote the entry on Stella's work in the catalogue for The Museum of Modern Art show and said, "Frank Stella has felt the need to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting.") The Black paintings were poorly received, and Stella was quickly dubbed "the Oblomov of art, the Czanne of Nihilism," although a few critics, notably Robert Rosenblum, soon acknowledged his importance. Stella reported later that although "people thought my painting was narrow and focused...it didn't seem that way to me. I thought it was inclusive. When I was making those paintings I loved Pollock and de Kooning" (quoted in A. Berman, Architectural Digest, Sept. 1983). Robert Rosenblum has discussed the paintings' heritage:
Black and white paintings were familiar enough in the work of de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell and Kline not to mention Mondrian... Continuing a tradition that could be traced from Mondrian's black bars on white grounds through Newman's thin bands on open fields of color, Stella's relation of black stripe to white linear ground exists in a constant ambiguity of solid and void... Moreover, as in Mondrian, these rectilinear relationships never produce discrete, self-sufficient shapes, but radiate beyond the canvas edges. Stella's rectangles, whether expanding concentrically or segmented by the perimeter, imply infinite extendibility, the taut fragments of a potentially larger whole. (R. Rosenblum, op. cit., p. 17)
In the sixteen months between the fall of 1958 and the end of 1959, Stella made twenty-three Black paintings in the series; they have been classified by Brenda Richardson in three groups, transitional, rectilinear and diamond pattern paintings. Stella considers Delta (the black and red painting) to be the first Black painting; and Delta is significant in the development of Turkish Mambo, since both paintings use the same repeated diagonal forms. In a number of preparatory drawings for his Black paintings, Stella included all three compositional types on the same sheet. One of the sheets, for example, includes a sketch for Turkish Mambo and diagrams for a rectilinear painting and a later "mitered maze" picture. Although it is possible to ascribe a chronology to the works, Stella does not regard it as important since the group was made in such a short period.
At the time of Turkish Mambo, Stella made two lists of titles. In the first he referred to Requiem (Tristano) and in the second to Turkish Mambo; he later identified these as referring to the present painting. Brenda Richardson's research shows that the titles allude to a blind pianist, Lennie Tristano, who had written a requiem for Charlie Parker; both Requiem (Tristano) and Turkish Mambo appear on an album by Tristano released in 1955. Richardson concludes:
It is not at all inconceivable that Stella was playing with the various aspects of "black" in the title Turkish Mambo--a blind composer, the black and white of a keyboard... the "black" of a Haitian (the mambo being of Haitian origin), and of course the "black" of death which is implicit in the title originally planned for the painting. (B. Richardson, op. cit., p. 68)
(fig. 1) Frank Stella with a Black painting, New York, 1959
Photograph by H. Frampton
(NO FIG #) The dining room of the Victor and Sally Ganz apartment
I found my eye, as it were, spellbound, held by a mystery... The term "perservation" seems superficially pertinent, yet the compulsiveness is controlled. To me the paintings express a stubborn, disciplined, even heroic rejection of worldly values. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 44)
William Rubin wrote in the same year that he was "almost mesmerized by their eerie, magical presence" (W. Rubin, Art International, Jan. 1960, vol. 4 (no. 1), p. 24). And Robert Rosenblum, an early teacher and champion of Stella, has said:
The Black paintings of 1959 were not born suddenly, but in fact, were the logical and patient distillation of a series of remarkable early works. In these, Stella, like many precocious young artists, did battle, as it were, with some of the major pictorial forces of the 1950s--the bold compartmented armatures of Gottlieb, the atmospheric tiers of Rothko, the heroic scale and openness of Newman... Thus, most of the values upheld by the masters of the 1950s were attacked by Stella in terms of their own grandiose dimensions. With clues taken from the refreshingly clear parallel and concentric geometries of Johns's early flags and targets, Stella managed to turn these old masters inside out... Atmospheric density, spatial overlays, discrete forms seen against grounds were all eradicated with disarming thoroughness and consistency. (R. Rosenblum, Artforum, March 1965, p. 21)
Frank Stella was twenty-three when he began the first Black paintings (fig. 1). In a very short time he had moved from significant but immature paintings that harked back to the Abstract Expressionist generation still dominant in New York to a group of paintings that were to revolutionize the direction of modern art. He described in a lecture at the Pratt Institute in 1959-60 how the paintings had come about. He needed to find a solution, he explained, to the problem of composition--"what to put here and there and how to make it go with what was already there"--and his solution came with the Black paintings (quoted in R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Harmondsworth, 1971, p. 57). Stella said:
I had to do something about relational painting... The obvious answer was symmetry, make it the same all over. The question still remained, though, of how to do this in depth... The solution I arrived at--and there are probably quite a few, although I know of only one other, color density--forces illusionistic space out of the painting at the constant rate by using a regulated pattern. (Quoted in ibid., p. 57)
This solution obviated the need to relate one area of the canvas to another and, at the same time, pushed painting in a new direction. Stella explained it in the now famous phrase: "All I want anyone to get from my paintings, and all I ever get out of them is the fact that you can see the whole idea without confusion. What you see is what you see" (quoted in B. Glaser, ARTnews, Sept. 1966, pp. 55-61).
To execute his works, Stella employed the tools and materials of house-painting. (At that time, he was living in TriBeCa and supporting himself by working for a house painter named J. Huriash in the Bedford Stuyvesant area of Brooklyn.) The logic was unassailable: he would use a house-painting brush to make bands the width of the brush all over his canvases according to a formula which he created to force illusionistic space out "at a constant rate."
The decision to paint in this way with simple, cheap (yet somehow expressive) materials released Stella to think about the problem of patterning. His diagram includes two sketches for the two sides of a note that says:
1. turning the
corner
2. the left over areas (Quoted in B. Richardson, exh. cat. Frank Stella: The Black Paintings, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, p. 79, 1976)
The sketches are diagrams for potential Black paintings, although neither was ever used. Stella's notes suggest a straight and logical process but other remarks which he made suggest that the path was less clear-cut. Stella describes working on a red and black painting (Delta, 1958; Collection the Artist) and recalls that something happened when he started to paint it out in black:
[I] realized I had outperformed myself. I was close to making what I wanted to, which was real painting (Quoted in J. Goldman, exh. cat. Frank Stella, Centro de Arte Reina Sofa, Madrid, 1990, p. 259).
Ellen Johnson chose Luncheon in the Grass (Location Unknown) and three Black paintings for a show at Oberlin College in May 1959, and Dorothy Miller included four Black paintings in the 16 Americans exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in December 1959. (Carl Andre wrote the entry on Stella's work in the catalogue for The Museum of Modern Art show and said, "Frank Stella has felt the need to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting.") The Black paintings were poorly received, and Stella was quickly dubbed "the Oblomov of art, the Czanne of Nihilism," although a few critics, notably Robert Rosenblum, soon acknowledged his importance. Stella reported later that although "people thought my painting was narrow and focused...it didn't seem that way to me. I thought it was inclusive. When I was making those paintings I loved Pollock and de Kooning" (quoted in A. Berman, Architectural Digest, Sept. 1983). Robert Rosenblum has discussed the paintings' heritage:
Black and white paintings were familiar enough in the work of de Kooning, Pollock, Motherwell and Kline not to mention Mondrian... Continuing a tradition that could be traced from Mondrian's black bars on white grounds through Newman's thin bands on open fields of color, Stella's relation of black stripe to white linear ground exists in a constant ambiguity of solid and void... Moreover, as in Mondrian, these rectilinear relationships never produce discrete, self-sufficient shapes, but radiate beyond the canvas edges. Stella's rectangles, whether expanding concentrically or segmented by the perimeter, imply infinite extendibility, the taut fragments of a potentially larger whole. (R. Rosenblum, op. cit., p. 17)
In the sixteen months between the fall of 1958 and the end of 1959, Stella made twenty-three Black paintings in the series; they have been classified by Brenda Richardson in three groups, transitional, rectilinear and diamond pattern paintings. Stella considers Delta (the black and red painting) to be the first Black painting; and Delta is significant in the development of Turkish Mambo, since both paintings use the same repeated diagonal forms. In a number of preparatory drawings for his Black paintings, Stella included all three compositional types on the same sheet. One of the sheets, for example, includes a sketch for Turkish Mambo and diagrams for a rectilinear painting and a later "mitered maze" picture. Although it is possible to ascribe a chronology to the works, Stella does not regard it as important since the group was made in such a short period.
At the time of Turkish Mambo, Stella made two lists of titles. In the first he referred to Requiem (Tristano) and in the second to Turkish Mambo; he later identified these as referring to the present painting. Brenda Richardson's research shows that the titles allude to a blind pianist, Lennie Tristano, who had written a requiem for Charlie Parker; both Requiem (Tristano) and Turkish Mambo appear on an album by Tristano released in 1955. Richardson concludes:
It is not at all inconceivable that Stella was playing with the various aspects of "black" in the title Turkish Mambo--a blind composer, the black and white of a keyboard... the "black" of a Haitian (the mambo being of Haitian origin), and of course the "black" of death which is implicit in the title originally planned for the painting. (B. Richardson, op. cit., p. 68)
(fig. 1) Frank Stella with a Black painting, New York, 1959
Photograph by H. Frampton
(NO FIG #) The dining room of the Victor and Sally Ganz apartment