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Lot Essay
Every so often, an artist develops a working relationship with printmaking that operates strictly within the conventional parameters of the medium, but with an intuitive understanding of the nature of the idiom that Is so thorough, precise, and provocative that the marriage between image and technique elevates the state of the art to new plateaus. Rauschenberg and Johns made such a contribution to the state of lithography in the 1960s; Picasso and now Frank Stella have done as much for etching.
Stella has been making prints for more than fifteen years. But while his printed works announce a crafts man like competence, they are so thoroughly obligated to his painterly images that they are virtually small reproductions of the larger two-dimensional work, probably because he viewed printmaking as a subordinate medium. Beginning with his Exotic Bird Series in 1976, however, Stella's restraint with respect to etching (perhaps the least likely printmaking medium to refer to his painterly work) was abandoned to a growing fascination with the literal fact of the plate itself; an intensive experimentation with etching techniques over the next few years reached full creative flower with the Circuits series in 1982.
lt appears that Stella was motivated to this involvement by his experience of working directly with sheet metal, which is, of course, the material of etching and engraving. In 1976, like Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg before him, Stella traveled to India at the invitation of the Sarabhai family to consider working on a project using local materials. In the marketplace of the city of Ahmedabad he discovered flat sheets of aluminum upon which the labels for American soft-drink brands had been misprinted before the sheets were to be formed and welded into cans. Apparently, it is more profitable for the misprinted sheets to be sold to Indian craftsmen, who use them to make storage boxes for spices and other culinary products, than it is to have them melted down and recycled. In any event, the sheets were readily available in India, and the red Coca Cola and green Seven-Up labels provided a ready-made surface decoration that Stella and the local artisans both found attractive. Working with the sheets, Stella sliced out his familiar protractor and french-curve shapes to manufacture three-dimensional maquettes that were the forerunners to his large-scale metal cutout and painted constructions of recent years.
It was the cutout shapes from the large metal works that directly inspired the Circuits prints. Many of the shapes for the metal constructions were cut with a laser beam that burned through the successive metal sheets onto the tabletops upon which they rested. This nest of interactive lines “etched” into the tabletop was the inspirational matrix for the image of Talledega Three I. Stella's particular genius was to recognize that the scale and physicality of his cutout metal shapes could be translated into prints. But more important, he had become confident enough of his own powers as a printmaker, and skilled enough in understanding the potential dynamics of etching, that he understood how his ideas could be implemented and thus was able to give free rein to them; he could imagine an image-technique combination that was as powerful an expression of his particular range of interests as it was an unparalleled technical synthesis. For the fact remains that Talledega Three I is a superbly inventive etching that reflects a masterful command of printmaking language.
Thomas Krens, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p. 120
Stella has been making prints for more than fifteen years. But while his printed works announce a crafts man like competence, they are so thoroughly obligated to his painterly images that they are virtually small reproductions of the larger two-dimensional work, probably because he viewed printmaking as a subordinate medium. Beginning with his Exotic Bird Series in 1976, however, Stella's restraint with respect to etching (perhaps the least likely printmaking medium to refer to his painterly work) was abandoned to a growing fascination with the literal fact of the plate itself; an intensive experimentation with etching techniques over the next few years reached full creative flower with the Circuits series in 1982.
lt appears that Stella was motivated to this involvement by his experience of working directly with sheet metal, which is, of course, the material of etching and engraving. In 1976, like Lichtenstein and Rauschenberg before him, Stella traveled to India at the invitation of the Sarabhai family to consider working on a project using local materials. In the marketplace of the city of Ahmedabad he discovered flat sheets of aluminum upon which the labels for American soft-drink brands had been misprinted before the sheets were to be formed and welded into cans. Apparently, it is more profitable for the misprinted sheets to be sold to Indian craftsmen, who use them to make storage boxes for spices and other culinary products, than it is to have them melted down and recycled. In any event, the sheets were readily available in India, and the red Coca Cola and green Seven-Up labels provided a ready-made surface decoration that Stella and the local artisans both found attractive. Working with the sheets, Stella sliced out his familiar protractor and french-curve shapes to manufacture three-dimensional maquettes that were the forerunners to his large-scale metal cutout and painted constructions of recent years.
It was the cutout shapes from the large metal works that directly inspired the Circuits prints. Many of the shapes for the metal constructions were cut with a laser beam that burned through the successive metal sheets onto the tabletops upon which they rested. This nest of interactive lines “etched” into the tabletop was the inspirational matrix for the image of Talledega Three I. Stella's particular genius was to recognize that the scale and physicality of his cutout metal shapes could be translated into prints. But more important, he had become confident enough of his own powers as a printmaker, and skilled enough in understanding the potential dynamics of etching, that he understood how his ideas could be implemented and thus was able to give free rein to them; he could imagine an image-technique combination that was as powerful an expression of his particular range of interests as it was an unparalleled technical synthesis. For the fact remains that Talledega Three I is a superbly inventive etching that reflects a masterful command of printmaking language.
Thomas Krens, The Modern Art of the Print: Selections from the Collection of Lois and Michael Torf, p. 120