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拍品專文
Abstraction stoked the creative fires of twentieth century painting, and Frank Stella added fuel to the flames. His monumental canvases evolved from restrained formal simplicity to exotic hued compositions that both embraced and challenged the nature of the artform. Firuzabad III is a particularly striking example of the artist’s ability to bend not only the visual content but the physical materials to his will. Created on a large figure-eight, the thick, even brushstrokes of a modern master meld paint with the support in an amalgam sprung from the need to push painting to its limits.
Carl Andre, on the occasion of Stella’s inclusion in the groundbreaking Sixteen Americans exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, noted, “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting” (quoted in Sixteen Americans, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959). Though Andre was speaking of Stella’s earlier, more linear works, pieces like the present work show the dedication and commitment to a singular visual investigation through pure color and line. The stripes become curves. The curves become forms. The forms are inextricably linked to the shape of the canvas and, in doing so, become part of our physical world.
Made up of two interlocking circles which are in turn constructed from two semi-circles, Firuzabad III is a riot of color within a carefully prescribed system of shapes. Both axes sit at the same diagonal, and the various sections radiate from each unit’s central point at an equal pace. The right circle has halves of salmon orange and dark gray-blue, their interiors filled with a spectrum of colors from burnt umber to deep maroon to cornflower blue in an abstracted fan motif. The left circle, made of the same blue and a peachy pink, exhibits a similar tonal array. However, this section visually overlaps the right like a piece of paper cut halfway. The blue section intercedes in the former’s salmon segment while the latter’s pink area seems to disappear behind the picture plane. Of course, there is no actual physical incursion, but Stella’s masterful application of paint and use of white lines of raw canvas to separate the colors elicit an optical response from the viewer. The work is flat, solid, and confrontational like the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, but this is confused by an almost trompe l’oeil use of visual space. Like two great wagon wheels careening into each other, Firuzabad III seems to have caught the moment of impact in a perfect harmony.
Part of the artist’s much-lauded Protractor series, Firuzabad III was inspired by a trip to the Middle East. Stella was taken with the circular roads and paths built into the urban environment by city planners of old, and shows this fascination by naming each work after a geographical point in the area. Several canvases share the name of the present lot, delineated by a number, and reference the city of Firuzabad in Iran. Though the present day city is laid out on a modern grid, the ancient plan just westward revolved around a perfect circular plan. Firuzabad and other so-called “round cities” were the inspiration for the central core of ancient Baghdad in neighboring Iraq. These geometric plans, formed with such precision by architects of the past, were a catalyst for Stella’s jump from more rectilinear compositions to the realm of curves and arcs.
William Rubin wrote in 1970 about this series, noting that, “owing to their partial and occasionally wholly circular formats, the pictures of the Protractor series are, in the first instance, anti-tectonic in a way hitherto unknown in Stella’s work. But they are also, paradoxically, the first that might be termed unremittingly architectural in both size and scale... The combination of the architectonic and the curvilinear is inherent, in this sense, in the very protractor motif on which this series is built, since the semi-circle of the protractor rests firmly on its rectilinear base” (Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 131-132). Breaking from the straight lines of his Black Paintings and the many iterations of the Notched V series, Stella infused monumentality with grace. Combining multiple colors within the same work, he composes a symphony of hues that further enhances the potential energy of the piece. In addition, the reference to the protractor (the title of this series of works) and in the curves of the artist’s canvases, connects them to the physical act of making the work. This push and pull between full absorption and the manual process of the artist’s hand is ever-present in Stella’s work and remains one of its most powerful features.
Carl Andre, on the occasion of Stella’s inclusion in the groundbreaking Sixteen Americans exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, noted, “Art excludes the unnecessary. Frank Stella has found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting. Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella’s painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting” (quoted in Sixteen Americans, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959). Though Andre was speaking of Stella’s earlier, more linear works, pieces like the present work show the dedication and commitment to a singular visual investigation through pure color and line. The stripes become curves. The curves become forms. The forms are inextricably linked to the shape of the canvas and, in doing so, become part of our physical world.
Made up of two interlocking circles which are in turn constructed from two semi-circles, Firuzabad III is a riot of color within a carefully prescribed system of shapes. Both axes sit at the same diagonal, and the various sections radiate from each unit’s central point at an equal pace. The right circle has halves of salmon orange and dark gray-blue, their interiors filled with a spectrum of colors from burnt umber to deep maroon to cornflower blue in an abstracted fan motif. The left circle, made of the same blue and a peachy pink, exhibits a similar tonal array. However, this section visually overlaps the right like a piece of paper cut halfway. The blue section intercedes in the former’s salmon segment while the latter’s pink area seems to disappear behind the picture plane. Of course, there is no actual physical incursion, but Stella’s masterful application of paint and use of white lines of raw canvas to separate the colors elicit an optical response from the viewer. The work is flat, solid, and confrontational like the rest of the artist’s oeuvre, but this is confused by an almost trompe l’oeil use of visual space. Like two great wagon wheels careening into each other, Firuzabad III seems to have caught the moment of impact in a perfect harmony.
Part of the artist’s much-lauded Protractor series, Firuzabad III was inspired by a trip to the Middle East. Stella was taken with the circular roads and paths built into the urban environment by city planners of old, and shows this fascination by naming each work after a geographical point in the area. Several canvases share the name of the present lot, delineated by a number, and reference the city of Firuzabad in Iran. Though the present day city is laid out on a modern grid, the ancient plan just westward revolved around a perfect circular plan. Firuzabad and other so-called “round cities” were the inspiration for the central core of ancient Baghdad in neighboring Iraq. These geometric plans, formed with such precision by architects of the past, were a catalyst for Stella’s jump from more rectilinear compositions to the realm of curves and arcs.
William Rubin wrote in 1970 about this series, noting that, “owing to their partial and occasionally wholly circular formats, the pictures of the Protractor series are, in the first instance, anti-tectonic in a way hitherto unknown in Stella’s work. But they are also, paradoxically, the first that might be termed unremittingly architectural in both size and scale... The combination of the architectonic and the curvilinear is inherent, in this sense, in the very protractor motif on which this series is built, since the semi-circle of the protractor rests firmly on its rectilinear base” (Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 131-132). Breaking from the straight lines of his Black Paintings and the many iterations of the Notched V series, Stella infused monumentality with grace. Combining multiple colors within the same work, he composes a symphony of hues that further enhances the potential energy of the piece. In addition, the reference to the protractor (the title of this series of works) and in the curves of the artist’s canvases, connects them to the physical act of making the work. This push and pull between full absorption and the manual process of the artist’s hand is ever-present in Stella’s work and remains one of its most powerful features.