.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品专文
“One learns about painting by looking at art… There is no other way to find out about painting” - Frank Stella
Acquired directly from the artist fifty years ago, Untitled (Concentric Squares) stands as an epitaph to two figures who helped define the American postwar canon: Frank Stella, a stalwart of a generation of abstract painters, and Leslie Feely, his close friend and a renowned dealer in her own right. During the course of her five-decade career as one of New York’s most respected dealers, Feely built an enviable roster of both clients and artists, including Stella. The present work continues his investigations in purely formal concerns, which began with his famed Black Paintings in the late 1950s. Deviating from those all-black canvases, Untitled (Concentric Squares), with its vibrant palette and sense of energy, still echoes Stella’s oft-cited mantra: “What you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W.S. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 41-42).
Untitled (Concentric Squares) is an unrivaled example from the series, with its eleven concentric bands of color that poetically transform from golden yellow through the color spectrum of orange, red, purple and green before arriving at a core of molten yellow. For what is ostensibly an austere and minimal composition, closer inspection reveals copious examples of the artist’s hand so beloved of the New York Action Painters of Stella’s early years. By first laying down a grid of still-visible graphite lines, Stella measures out the exact dimensions of his concentric squares. Each of these bands of color is then applied by Stella’s hand, the idiosyncrasies of each of the long brush strokes still visible where they meet the thin slivers of raw canvases that separate each of the squares. This particular example is celebrated for its successful arrangement of colors that systematically draws the eye from the edges of the canvas to its center using a gradual progression of tones from the warm outer bands
through the cooler interior bodies of color before letting the eye come to a rest in the molten center. Unlike other examples where the bands of color are often arranged in a more erratic fashion, in the present work there is a clear sequence which results in the ability to bask in reflected glory of the artist’s deliberate process. Adding to this effect is the painting’s monumental scale, enveloping the viewer in the hypnotic pull of vibrant color.
Untitled (Concentric Squares) is the result of Stella’s lifelong study of painting. His famous “What you see…” reference was the result of his thoughtful investigations into what it meant to be an artist and to paint a picture in the generation of Abstract Expressionism. In a lecture at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1960, Stella enthused his students that the only way to truly understand art is to look at it, “One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can’t stress enough how important it is, if you’re interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about a painting” (F. Stella, quoted in M. Auping, Frank Stella A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 153). Stella looked to early Renaissance art as an investigation of spatial perspective. The compositions of Piero della Francesca, for example, helped him arrive at the idea of producing symmetrical compositions and using color to force illusionistic space out of painting, something that the present example does with aplomb.
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
Stella sought to trace a new path for his art. Not one for recreating the existing world, he was more concerned with creating an entirely new one, as critic Paul Goldberger writes, “For Stella, the point was never the trick of pictorial perspective but the notion that the canvas was a real object existing in real space, with a real shape; not a window to another world but a full and complete world unto itself… In each instance Stella was making works of tremendous intensity that demanded to occupy real, not just conceptual space” (P. Goldberger, “Frank Stella Architecture,” in G. Tinterow (ed.), Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, exh cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007, p.11).
Stella’s famous pronouncement to his Pratt students is one which would have certainly found support with Leslie Feely. Over the course of five decades, she assisting her clients in building collections of quality, veracity and sheer aesthetic beauty. She worked with individuals and institutions of the highest caliber, placing important works in prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She was a dealer of impeccable standing, possessing an exemplary eye and gained a reputation for consummate professionalism. She had a profound effect on everyone she came in to contact with, and the wider art world in general, and leaves a legacy widely felt by her friends and colleagues and throughout the art world in general.
Acquired directly from the artist fifty years ago, Untitled (Concentric Squares) stands as an epitaph to two figures who helped define the American postwar canon: Frank Stella, a stalwart of a generation of abstract painters, and Leslie Feely, his close friend and a renowned dealer in her own right. During the course of her five-decade career as one of New York’s most respected dealers, Feely built an enviable roster of both clients and artists, including Stella. The present work continues his investigations in purely formal concerns, which began with his famed Black Paintings in the late 1950s. Deviating from those all-black canvases, Untitled (Concentric Squares), with its vibrant palette and sense of energy, still echoes Stella’s oft-cited mantra: “What you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W.S. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 41-42).
Untitled (Concentric Squares) is an unrivaled example from the series, with its eleven concentric bands of color that poetically transform from golden yellow through the color spectrum of orange, red, purple and green before arriving at a core of molten yellow. For what is ostensibly an austere and minimal composition, closer inspection reveals copious examples of the artist’s hand so beloved of the New York Action Painters of Stella’s early years. By first laying down a grid of still-visible graphite lines, Stella measures out the exact dimensions of his concentric squares. Each of these bands of color is then applied by Stella’s hand, the idiosyncrasies of each of the long brush strokes still visible where they meet the thin slivers of raw canvases that separate each of the squares. This particular example is celebrated for its successful arrangement of colors that systematically draws the eye from the edges of the canvas to its center using a gradual progression of tones from the warm outer bands
through the cooler interior bodies of color before letting the eye come to a rest in the molten center. Unlike other examples where the bands of color are often arranged in a more erratic fashion, in the present work there is a clear sequence which results in the ability to bask in reflected glory of the artist’s deliberate process. Adding to this effect is the painting’s monumental scale, enveloping the viewer in the hypnotic pull of vibrant color.
Untitled (Concentric Squares) is the result of Stella’s lifelong study of painting. His famous “What you see…” reference was the result of his thoughtful investigations into what it meant to be an artist and to paint a picture in the generation of Abstract Expressionism. In a lecture at New York’s Pratt Institute in 1960, Stella enthused his students that the only way to truly understand art is to look at it, “One learns about painting by looking at and imitating other painters. I can’t stress enough how important it is, if you’re interested at all in painting, to look and to look a great deal at painting. There is no other way to find out about a painting” (F. Stella, quoted in M. Auping, Frank Stella A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 153). Stella looked to early Renaissance art as an investigation of spatial perspective. The compositions of Piero della Francesca, for example, helped him arrive at the idea of producing symmetrical compositions and using color to force illusionistic space out of painting, something that the present example does with aplomb.
SHAPE \* MERGEFORMAT
Stella sought to trace a new path for his art. Not one for recreating the existing world, he was more concerned with creating an entirely new one, as critic Paul Goldberger writes, “For Stella, the point was never the trick of pictorial perspective but the notion that the canvas was a real object existing in real space, with a real shape; not a window to another world but a full and complete world unto itself… In each instance Stella was making works of tremendous intensity that demanded to occupy real, not just conceptual space” (P. Goldberger, “Frank Stella Architecture,” in G. Tinterow (ed.), Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, exh cat., Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2007, p.11).
Stella’s famous pronouncement to his Pratt students is one which would have certainly found support with Leslie Feely. Over the course of five decades, she assisting her clients in building collections of quality, veracity and sheer aesthetic beauty. She worked with individuals and institutions of the highest caliber, placing important works in prominent institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. She was a dealer of impeccable standing, possessing an exemplary eye and gained a reputation for consummate professionalism. She had a profound effect on everyone she came in to contact with, and the wider art world in general, and leaves a legacy widely felt by her friends and colleagues and throughout the art world in general.