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Lot Essay
“Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting…”—Carl Andre
Having remained in the artist’s collection for over fifty years, Paradoxe sur le comédien is an exemplar of the revolutionary practice that Frank Stella devised to redefine the course of twentieth-century art. Coming of age during the gestural dominance of Abstract Expressionism, Stella eschewed the psychological and emotional charge pioneered by the likes of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning with his now famous adage “…what you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 76). His early Black Paintings were exactly that, large black canvases in which the emblematic nature of the gesture had been eradicated. Following these iconic works, Stella experimented with a number of motifs, before arriving at his Concentric Squares; Paradoxe sur le comédien is one of these monumental paintings which feature the largest iteration of these now celebrated motifs.
Measuring nearly 24 feet across, the present work is comprised of two of Stella’s concentric squares painted side-by-side on a single canvas. It was a motif that the artist first introduced in 1960, working on a much smaller scale, but it is only with the present work that it reached its ultimate conclusion. Across the surface of this large canvas, alternating bands of light and dark tones pull the viewer’s gaze hypnotically into the center of each composition. The left-hand section of the canvas, with its alternating bands of light and darks colors, directs the gaze towards its molten core of hot reds and golden yellows. This is counterbalanced by its neighbor on the right, where the white bands have been replaced with gray passages, giving this section of the canvas a greater weight, pushing the viewer’s gaze out towards the edges of the picture plane.
Discussing this series, Stella has said, “The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured” (F. Stella, quoted in W. Rubin and F. Stella (eds.), Frank Stella, 1970-1987, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. p. 48). Stella evidently viewed the series as a reaction to his earlier, more experimental ’70s paintings, like the Polish Village works. The consistency of the present work gave Stella the opportunity to once again explore color within a consistent and effective compositional framework.
Paradoxe sur le comédien belongs to what became known as the artist’s Diderot paintings, named after the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher, writer, art critic and encyclopedia contributor Denis Diderot. The present work’s title, in English translated as the Paradox of the Actor, is taken from an essay written by Diderot which promotes a theory of acting, claiming that great actors are characterized by a complete absence of feeling, and true acting is actually a display of the illusion of that feeling. Therefore, Diderot wrote, a great performer is guided by his intelligence and not by his emotions. A student of philosophy in college and after, Stella’s work, with its firm adherence to self-imposed rules, behaves like Diderot’s philosophical treatises and is grounded in consistency and reliant on internal and universal logic.
Stella’s practice was radical from the beginning. In the late 1950s, a generation of artists began to question the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, and Stella became the leading proponent of this new, highly rational, version of abstraction. He worked from within the modernist tradition and, as can be seen in Paradoxe sur le comédien, he worked hard to divest gesture from meaning. Beginning with his Black Paintings (painted in 1958), the artist dismantled illusionism by stripping away any kind of subject matter, be it allegorical or anecdotal, that had been suggested via the painted surface. As Stella’s friend and fellow artist Carl Andre remarked, “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting… His stripes are the path of brush on canvas” (C. Andre, quoted by A. Weinberg, “The End Depends Upon the Beginning,” in M. Auping (ed.). Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 1).
After the critical success of his Black Paintings, in 1963 Stella embarked on a series of thirteen dramatically shaped canvases that became known as his Dartmouth Paintings, painted during a summer residency at the Ivy League school. These paintings were distinguished by their shaped canvases with Stella departing from using a more traditionally square or rectangular shaped canvas in favor of more dramatic silhouettes. His earlier Aluminum Paintings had begun this transition, but the small ‘notches’ cut into the edges of these works were nothing compared to the bold interventions that Stella employed in his Dartmouth Paintings. All variations of wedge- or chevron shaped-canvases, they were painted in single colors, with a series of chevrons emanating from the center. The monochromatic palette, along with the bold silhouette, is what Stella regarded as being crucial to the success of these paintings, “…in these pictures I felt this was working for me because they were so radically shaped… Any jumping around in the color—any big change in value or intensity [as in the artist’s previous chromatically vivid Benjamin Moore Paintings]—and I would have been in a lot of trouble” (F. Stella, quoted by W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 97).
Stella’s early investigations into the power of color and form began with works from his famed Protractor Series. Executed in 1968, these works feature ‘fans’ of vibrant pigment joined together by a shaped canvas. Individually named after ancient cities in what is now modern-day Syria, these paintings have subsequently become some of the artist’s most recognizable paintings. This is partly due, perhaps, to their success in achieving Stella’s aims at this point in his painterly career. “My main interest,” Stella once said, has been to make what is popularly called a decorative painting truly viable in inequivalent abstract terms….Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. I don’t know, but that’s where I’d like my paintings to go” F. Stella, ibid.).
As an artist, Frank Stella’s trajectory traces the path of late twentieth-century painting, from the past and beyond into the future. Touchstones throughout his oeuvre have served as evolutionary markers in the history of abstraction. His Black Paintings set the stage for a career-long investigation that the artist continued until his death in 2024. Robert Rosenblum, speaking in 1970, noted, “One constant, at least, of this decade is the importance of the Black Paintings as epochal art history; for now, like then, they retain the watershed quality so apparent when they were first seen in 1959. Today too they have the character of a wilful and successful manifesto that would wipe out the past of art and that would establish the foundation stones for a new kind of art” (R. Rosenblum, quoted in S. Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography, New York, 1995, p. 46). He may well have replaced “decade” with “century,” as the hard lines and shaped canvases that Stella produced have been the proverbial seed for myriad young artists in the years since. Though his paintings became more lyrical and colorful as the years progressed, the artist has never lost his connection to the actual making of the work and the quest for innovation. Eschewing the traditional rectilinear format in favor of a convergence of line, color, and shape in perfect harmony, Stella’s work makes it hard to speak about paintings as something divorced from our own physical world.
Having remained in the artist’s collection for over fifty years, Paradoxe sur le comédien is an exemplar of the revolutionary practice that Frank Stella devised to redefine the course of twentieth-century art. Coming of age during the gestural dominance of Abstract Expressionism, Stella eschewed the psychological and emotional charge pioneered by the likes of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning with his now famous adage “…what you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W. Rubin, Frank Stella, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970, p. 76). His early Black Paintings were exactly that, large black canvases in which the emblematic nature of the gesture had been eradicated. Following these iconic works, Stella experimented with a number of motifs, before arriving at his Concentric Squares; Paradoxe sur le comédien is one of these monumental paintings which feature the largest iteration of these now celebrated motifs.
Measuring nearly 24 feet across, the present work is comprised of two of Stella’s concentric squares painted side-by-side on a single canvas. It was a motif that the artist first introduced in 1960, working on a much smaller scale, but it is only with the present work that it reached its ultimate conclusion. Across the surface of this large canvas, alternating bands of light and dark tones pull the viewer’s gaze hypnotically into the center of each composition. The left-hand section of the canvas, with its alternating bands of light and darks colors, directs the gaze towards its molten core of hot reds and golden yellows. This is counterbalanced by its neighbor on the right, where the white bands have been replaced with gray passages, giving this section of the canvas a greater weight, pushing the viewer’s gaze out towards the edges of the picture plane.
Discussing this series, Stella has said, “The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured” (F. Stella, quoted in W. Rubin and F. Stella (eds.), Frank Stella, 1970-1987, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1988. p. 48). Stella evidently viewed the series as a reaction to his earlier, more experimental ’70s paintings, like the Polish Village works. The consistency of the present work gave Stella the opportunity to once again explore color within a consistent and effective compositional framework.
Paradoxe sur le comédien belongs to what became known as the artist’s Diderot paintings, named after the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher, writer, art critic and encyclopedia contributor Denis Diderot. The present work’s title, in English translated as the Paradox of the Actor, is taken from an essay written by Diderot which promotes a theory of acting, claiming that great actors are characterized by a complete absence of feeling, and true acting is actually a display of the illusion of that feeling. Therefore, Diderot wrote, a great performer is guided by his intelligence and not by his emotions. A student of philosophy in college and after, Stella’s work, with its firm adherence to self-imposed rules, behaves like Diderot’s philosophical treatises and is grounded in consistency and reliant on internal and universal logic.
Stella’s practice was radical from the beginning. In the late 1950s, a generation of artists began to question the dominance of Abstract Expressionism, and Stella became the leading proponent of this new, highly rational, version of abstraction. He worked from within the modernist tradition and, as can be seen in Paradoxe sur le comédien, he worked hard to divest gesture from meaning. Beginning with his Black Paintings (painted in 1958), the artist dismantled illusionism by stripping away any kind of subject matter, be it allegorical or anecdotal, that had been suggested via the painted surface. As Stella’s friend and fellow artist Carl Andre remarked, “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting… His stripes are the path of brush on canvas” (C. Andre, quoted by A. Weinberg, “The End Depends Upon the Beginning,” in M. Auping (ed.). Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 1).
After the critical success of his Black Paintings, in 1963 Stella embarked on a series of thirteen dramatically shaped canvases that became known as his Dartmouth Paintings, painted during a summer residency at the Ivy League school. These paintings were distinguished by their shaped canvases with Stella departing from using a more traditionally square or rectangular shaped canvas in favor of more dramatic silhouettes. His earlier Aluminum Paintings had begun this transition, but the small ‘notches’ cut into the edges of these works were nothing compared to the bold interventions that Stella employed in his Dartmouth Paintings. All variations of wedge- or chevron shaped-canvases, they were painted in single colors, with a series of chevrons emanating from the center. The monochromatic palette, along with the bold silhouette, is what Stella regarded as being crucial to the success of these paintings, “…in these pictures I felt this was working for me because they were so radically shaped… Any jumping around in the color—any big change in value or intensity [as in the artist’s previous chromatically vivid Benjamin Moore Paintings]—and I would have been in a lot of trouble” (F. Stella, quoted by W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 97).
Stella’s early investigations into the power of color and form began with works from his famed Protractor Series. Executed in 1968, these works feature ‘fans’ of vibrant pigment joined together by a shaped canvas. Individually named after ancient cities in what is now modern-day Syria, these paintings have subsequently become some of the artist’s most recognizable paintings. This is partly due, perhaps, to their success in achieving Stella’s aims at this point in his painterly career. “My main interest,” Stella once said, has been to make what is popularly called a decorative painting truly viable in inequivalent abstract terms….Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. I don’t know, but that’s where I’d like my paintings to go” F. Stella, ibid.).
As an artist, Frank Stella’s trajectory traces the path of late twentieth-century painting, from the past and beyond into the future. Touchstones throughout his oeuvre have served as evolutionary markers in the history of abstraction. His Black Paintings set the stage for a career-long investigation that the artist continued until his death in 2024. Robert Rosenblum, speaking in 1970, noted, “One constant, at least, of this decade is the importance of the Black Paintings as epochal art history; for now, like then, they retain the watershed quality so apparent when they were first seen in 1959. Today too they have the character of a wilful and successful manifesto that would wipe out the past of art and that would establish the foundation stones for a new kind of art” (R. Rosenblum, quoted in S. Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography, New York, 1995, p. 46). He may well have replaced “decade” with “century,” as the hard lines and shaped canvases that Stella produced have been the proverbial seed for myriad young artists in the years since. Though his paintings became more lyrical and colorful as the years progressed, the artist has never lost his connection to the actual making of the work and the quest for innovation. Eschewing the traditional rectilinear format in favor of a convergence of line, color, and shape in perfect harmony, Stella’s work makes it hard to speak about paintings as something divorced from our own physical world.