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Lot Essay
Agadir I is a masterful example of one of Frank Stella’s significant “Moroccan Series” paintings accomplished between 1964 and 1965, named after cities in Morocco. It is a superb example of a new departure in paint. In Agadir I, Stella employs a dazzling, optically brilliant palette of fluorescent Day-Glo acrylic colors, hues of greater luminosity than those of his earlier canvases. Frank Stella was one of the first artists of the post-Abstract Expressionist cohort to choose an alternative approach to the application of paint, a rational and cerebral approach counter to the improvisatory gestural style of the Abstract Expressionists.
Agadir I shows an edge-to-edge, all-over horizontal pattern of contrasting yellow and red bands, the parallel lines bisected and disrupted by a white stripe moving diagonally across the canvas. The resulting sensuousness, brilliance and vividness of color were not previously seen in the darker palette of Stella’s earlier paintings. In Agadir I, the artist applied the paint in a single layer, a thin film of color, creating a lightness of feeling and a transparency not hitherto apparent in his work. Unlike in his works immediately preceding this series, Stella chose not to use a shaped canvas, the better to focus the viewer’s attention on the colors and patterns themselves. Thus Agadir I conjures an electric sense of optical tension that exists between the two alternating colors and bands on the flat surface of the canvas.
Frank Stella is one of the towering figures among the generation of American artists who came of age beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s defining a new visual language entirely their own. With works such as Agadir I, Stella pushed forward a new visual vocabulary that continues to inspire into the 21st century.
Agadir I shows an edge-to-edge, all-over horizontal pattern of contrasting yellow and red bands, the parallel lines bisected and disrupted by a white stripe moving diagonally across the canvas. The resulting sensuousness, brilliance and vividness of color were not previously seen in the darker palette of Stella’s earlier paintings. In Agadir I, the artist applied the paint in a single layer, a thin film of color, creating a lightness of feeling and a transparency not hitherto apparent in his work. Unlike in his works immediately preceding this series, Stella chose not to use a shaped canvas, the better to focus the viewer’s attention on the colors and patterns themselves. Thus Agadir I conjures an electric sense of optical tension that exists between the two alternating colors and bands on the flat surface of the canvas.
Frank Stella is one of the towering figures among the generation of American artists who came of age beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s defining a new visual language entirely their own. With works such as Agadir I, Stella pushed forward a new visual vocabulary that continues to inspire into the 21st century.