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Frank Stella
Untitled
1991

Name: Untitled
Brand: Frank Stella
Price: 8500 USD
Availability: InStock

About the Item

A unique example of a section of color lithograph including hand editions by the artist, collaged on a support board. Signed, dated, and inscribed "For Pat" in ink in the image. (see photos) Condition: Excellent Image: 14 x 18" Note: The artist cut this corner off of a larger work. The composition is similar to the background edges of several large prints Stella made as part of the Moby Dick Deckles Edges series, published in 1993 "Moby Dick, of course, refers to the Great 19th-century American novel by Herman Melville about Ahab hunting the great white whale. Stella has devoted the better part of a decade to making collages, sculpture, prints and mural-sized relief paintings from the book’s 135 chapters. There’s a Stella image for every chapter. The decide edges in the title refer to the irregularly shaped painted margins of the handmade paper, a dramatic device that intensifies the floating-island quality of the images. Even for those viewers already familiar with Stella’s intensely abstract and techni-colored geometries, the idea of a storyline or narrative behind his visually woven art is a bit unfathomable. Asked about the relationship between Melville’s novel and Stella’s art (his titles for individual works, such as Monstrous Pictures Of Whales, come directly from the book), Stella says: “It is not directly based on the novel, chapter by chapter, but it’s a kind of association. I don’t mean to impinge on Melville in any way. I just follow the example.” He expands on the association between his current work and Melville’s: “A lot of the continuity in Melville is not so different from collage. Melville jumps from one idea to another, and the rhythm is so great and the imagery is so good, he puts it together and they work. It’s like the wave, it’s very up and down.” Outfitted casually in a black T-shirt, nondescript chinos and boating moccasins, Stella continued his multilayered answer in mellifluous yet staccato bunts, just a few decibels louder than the incessant din coming from all corners of the studio. “It has a sustained kind of imagery that is basically the wave and the whale forms. You can’t really tell a story because it is abstract, but you get the sense of the forms and the shapes relating to each other. I’m just trying to make a similar kind of voyage to see if painting is capable of that kind of sustained effort.” The series was also influenced by the artist’s frequent trips to the Coney Island Aquarium in Brooklyn with his young children and watching the captive whales cut through the water. Musing again, Stella says: “As far as its being about Moby Dick, most people would say, ‘I don’t get it.’ But if you saw ten or fifteen of the pieces, you might begin to get some sense of it.” From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Frank Stella Born Frank Philip Stella May 12, 1936 Malden, Massachusetts, U.S. Died May 4, 2024 (aged 87) New York City, New York, U.S. Known for Movement Modernism, minimal art, abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, abstract illusionism, lyrical abstraction, hard-edge painting, shaped canvas painting, color field painting Awards 1984 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton lectures National Medal of Arts Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.Stella lived and worked in New York City. Biography Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. He was the oldest of their three children. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting. In his sophomore year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a teacher at the school, began teaching Stella how to paint. After entering Princeton University to earn a degree in history, Stella took art courses and was introduced to the New York art scene by painter Stephen Greene and art historian William Seitz, professors at the school who brought him to exhibitions in the city. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism. He is heralded for having created abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting. In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City. As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Work Late 1950s and early 1960s Jasper's Dilemma (1962-1963) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022 Upon moving to New York City, he began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object. Stella created a series of paintings in 1958-1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. Using commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush, he painted black stripes of the same width and evenly spaced on bare canvas, leaving the thin strips of canvas between them unpainted and exposed, along with his pencil-and-ruler drawn guidelines. Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work, dismissing them with his well-known tautology, "What you see is what you see", which became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961.[ Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more". In 1978 he married pediatrician Harriet McGurk. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!" or "Raise the Flag! in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied," the anthem of the Nazi Party. According to Stella himself, the painting has similar proportions as banners used by that organization. In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York the same year. From 1960 his works used shaped canvases, developing in 1966 into more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series. In 1967, Stella began his Protractor Series of paintings, which feature arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. Late 1960s and early 1970s Frank Stella Harran II, 1967 In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one. In the next decade, Stella brought to his artistic productions the element of relief, which he called "maximalist" painting because it had sculptural attributes. He presented wood and other materials in his Polish Village series (1970-1973), executed in high relief. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as these works became more uninhibited and intricate, his Minimalism became baroque. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Series. He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas." In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. 1980s and afterward Frank Stella "La scienza della fiacca, 1984, oil paint, enamel paint, and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC Stella's Memantra, 2005, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art Frank Stella in 2012 From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella produced a large oeuvre that grappled with Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick in a broad way. To generate these, the artist made collages or scale models that were subsequently enlarged to the original's specifications by his assistants. In 1993, he designed and executed for Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a 10,000-square-foot mural installation which covers the ceiling of the dome, the proscenium arch and the exterior rear wall of the building. The mural for the dome was based on computer-generated imagery.[28] In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia at the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. A monumental sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, ein Schauspiel, 3x [D#8], 2001, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The titles for Stella's Scarlatti Sonata Kirkpatrick series evoke the rhythms and sounds of the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio. By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures. The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits. His Jasper's Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at 7 World Trade Center in 2021.[38] In late 2022, Stella launched an NFT (non-fungible token) that includes the right to the CAD files to 3D print the art works in the NFTs. Artists' rights On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella was a member artist of the Artists Rights Society published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located". In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote, The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search. The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work...

Creator:

Frank Stella (1936, American)

Creation Year:

1991

Dimensions:

Height: 23 in (58.42 cm)Width: 24 in (60.96 cm)

Medium:

Lithograph

Movement & Style:

Abstract

Period:

1990-1999

Condition:

One crease to the image, unobtrusive and supported by the support board.

Gallery Location:

Fairlawn, OH

Reference Number:

Seller: FA106731stDibs: LU14014392672

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Shop All Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Frank Stella was one of the central figures in postwar American art. A proponent of minimalism and non-representational abstraction, Stella was a painter, printmaker and sculptor.

A native of Massachusetts, Stella attended Phillips Academy in Andover and earned a BA from Princeton, where he studied art and color theory with Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. Stella frequented New York galleries as a student and was intrigued by the work of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, both of whom were at the height of their creative powers in the late 1950s.

After moving to New York in 1958, Stella gravitated toward the geometric abstraction and restrained painting style of Barnett Newman and Jasper Johns.

Johns’s flat, graphic images of common objects such as targets and flags prompt viewers to question the essential nature of representation and whether these pictures are really paintings or simply new iterations of the items themselves. Stella pushed Johns’s reasoning further, considering paintings on canvas as objects in their own right, like sculptures, rather than representations. This led him to reject certain formal conventions, eschewing sketches and often using nontraditional materials, like house paint.

In 1959, Stella created his “Black Paintings,” series, in which bands of black paint are separated by thin, precise stripes of bare canvas. At a time when contemporary painting was all about wild gestures, thick paint and formal abandon, these pieces created a sensation. That same year, Stella's work was included in the exhibition "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and he joined the roster of artists represented by Leo Castelli Gallery. In 1960, he began introducing color into his work and using unconventionally shaped canvases to complement his compositions.

In his “Eccentric Polygon” series, from 1965 and ‘66, Stella embraces asymmetry and bold color, creating forms delineated by painted fields and by the edges of the canvas. This series was followed by the 1967–70 “Protractor” series, characterized by colorful circles and arcs. Named after the ancient cities whose circular plans Stella had noticed while traveling in the Middle East during the 1960s, these works usually comprised several canvases set flush against one another so that the geometric figures in each section came together in a larger, more complex whole.

Also in the mid-1960s, Stella started exploring printmaking, initially working with Kenneth Tyler, of Gemini G.E.L., and later installing printing equipment in his own studio. In 1968, he created the “V” series of lithographs, which included the print Quathlamba I. Following a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, Stella began working in three dimensions, adding relief elements to paintings, which could almost be considered wall-mounted sculptures.

Stella’s 1970–73 “Polish Village” series was inspired by documentary photos and architectural drawings of Polish synagogues that had been destroyed by Nazis during World War II. The resulting works — composed primarily of paint and cloth on plywood — are more rugged and less polished than his previous series.

Herman Melville's Moby Dick was Stella's muse for a series of three- dimensional works he created in the 1980s in which waveforms, architectural elements and Platonic solids play a prominent role. During this period, Stella embraced a new, exuberant style that is exemplified in "La Scienza della Fiacca."

In 1997, the artist oversaw the creation of the Stella Project, a 5,000-square-foot work inside the Moores Opera House at the University of Houston. A large free-standing sculpture by Stella stands outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Stella’s work is in the collections of numerous important museums around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art and Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Menil Collection, in Houston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, in Washington, D.C.; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Obama in 2009, and was given the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.

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