Lot Essay
Il Drago e la Cavalina Fatata is from Stella's Cones and Pillars series, a complex and demanding group of forty-eight metal reliefs which Stella executed between 1984 and 1987. These reliefs are the culmination of Stella's investigation of constructed or engineered works that began with his Exotic Birds a decade earlier (see note to Lot 9), and are informed by his renewed interest in the history of Baroque painting and Constructivist art. Stella has commented:
The works have a blunt, primitive quality to them as paintings... They have very much the spirit of the well-told folktale. They are very active, they're very fantasy-like, and they're very simple--even brutal--in the way that fairy tales are... I had the feeling that with a little bit of mental jockeying their forms could represent things. It wasn't hard to imagine them being a cat or a person. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella: 1970-1987, New York, 1987, p. 142)
The forms in these works are derived from the cones in the mathematical treatise, accompanied by shapes similar to those he had used in his Shards series. Stella has said about these shapes:
They mean something special to me. I love the shapes as shapes and, for me, they have an intrinsic identity and value. I like them in themselves and don't see them just as forms to be manipulated. They're very personal: I like them the way someone might like his girlfriend's ankle. (Quoted in ibid., p. 117)
The Cones and Pillars series represents a step away from the strictly controlled formal procedures of Stella's earlier work, and a step closer to an evocative and personal exploration of shape. As Stella continued:
But I like the fact that these shapes function evocatively. Indeed, you short-circuit that evocativeness precisely by giving such shapes too particular an identity. That shuts out lots of other reverberations which they possess simply as shapes. (Quoted in ibid., p. 117)
Stella asks from painting what he expects from his own art--a combination of northeastern pragmatism and mediterranean warmth:
The roots of 1960s abstraction, so thoroughly grounded in the abstraction of the north, in the encouraging anti-materialism of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich, must be reinforced with energy drawn from the realism of the south--the tough, stubborn materialism of Czanne, Monet, and Picasso, who insist that if abstraction is to drive the endeavor of painting it must make painting real--real like the painting that flourished in sixteenth-century Italy. (Ibid., p. 160)
The works have a blunt, primitive quality to them as paintings... They have very much the spirit of the well-told folktale. They are very active, they're very fantasy-like, and they're very simple--even brutal--in the way that fairy tales are... I had the feeling that with a little bit of mental jockeying their forms could represent things. It wasn't hard to imagine them being a cat or a person. (Quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella: 1970-1987, New York, 1987, p. 142)
The forms in these works are derived from the cones in the mathematical treatise, accompanied by shapes similar to those he had used in his Shards series. Stella has said about these shapes:
They mean something special to me. I love the shapes as shapes and, for me, they have an intrinsic identity and value. I like them in themselves and don't see them just as forms to be manipulated. They're very personal: I like them the way someone might like his girlfriend's ankle. (Quoted in ibid., p. 117)
The Cones and Pillars series represents a step away from the strictly controlled formal procedures of Stella's earlier work, and a step closer to an evocative and personal exploration of shape. As Stella continued:
But I like the fact that these shapes function evocatively. Indeed, you short-circuit that evocativeness precisely by giving such shapes too particular an identity. That shuts out lots of other reverberations which they possess simply as shapes. (Quoted in ibid., p. 117)
Stella asks from painting what he expects from his own art--a combination of northeastern pragmatism and mediterranean warmth:
The roots of 1960s abstraction, so thoroughly grounded in the abstraction of the north, in the encouraging anti-materialism of Mondrian, Kandinsky, and Malevich, must be reinforced with energy drawn from the realism of the south--the tough, stubborn materialism of Czanne, Monet, and Picasso, who insist that if abstraction is to drive the endeavor of painting it must make painting real--real like the painting that flourished in sixteenth-century Italy. (Ibid., p. 160)