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Lot Essay
Pulsating with chromatic brilliance and mesmerizing optical rhythm, Abra I from 1968 is a reverberating encapsulation of Frank Stella’s incisive intellectual rigor. Bridging the gap between the grandiosity of Abstract Expressionism and the quiet ethos of Minimalism, the present work envelops the viewer through its scale, color and composition.
After graduating from Princeton, Stella rose to prominence as a leading figure of the Minimalist movement with his Black Paintings of 1958 to 1960. Into the next decade, Stella prosperously expanded and refined upon his method becoming a skillful colorist, always mindful that his paintings remain adamantly non-referential and abstract.
Concerned with rhythm, interval, and repetition, recurring motifs throughout his oeuvre, the present work arises out of initial drawings made on a smaller scale with the aid of a protractor, which gives the name to this outstanding body of work from the late sixties and early seventies.
The Protractor series was originally conceived as a group of thirty-one unique formats executed in three variations each, with internal structures ranging from fan-like and circular, to semicircular and interwoven.
According to art historian Gregor Stemmrich, Stella’s “calling the series ‘Protractor,’ naming it after a tool for drawing and measuring that everyone is familiar with from school, indicates that he wished to allude to Jasper John’s use of the ‘ruler’ as a tool for smearing paint into semicircles, which he used as a ‘device’ … in many paintings, in order to emphasize the flatness of the canvas and to leave no doubt about the material quality of the painting” (H. Bröker, M. Brüderlin and G. Stemmrich, Frank Stella: The Retrospective, Works 1958-2012, Ostfildern, 2012, p. 49).
Dating from 1968, just two years before Frank Stella became the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—making Stella the youngest artist ever to receive that honor, to this day—Abra I encompasses the conceptual and aesthetic concerns that have characterized the very best of the artist’s output.
This body of work, that in most instances bears the names of Islamic cities as titles, was deeply influenced by the artist’s visit to Asia Minor, where he travelled in 1963 with his dear friend and then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler and art collectors Stanley and Shirley Woodward.
During this time, Stella was fascinated by the circular layouts of many of the cities he visited. This inspiration can be found not only in the names of the paintings, but within the curvilinear forms that weave together in Abra I, reminiscent of Islamic arabesque motifs.
As Robert Rosenblum noted, “The springing vaults of the arcs, some reaching as high as four feet above one's head, turn the painting into something that verges on the architectural, a work that might rest on the floor and be subject to natural physical laws of load and support. Seen on this immense scale, the thrusts and counterthrusts, the taut and perfect spanning of great spaces, the razor-sharp interlocking of points of stress all contrive to plunge the observer into a dizzying tour-de-force of aesthetic engineering.” (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Baltimore, 1971, p. 49)
The conformation of Abra I represents the culmination of this effort to shift the focus of painting from representation to bodily experience, drawing the eye to the center of the composition and creating a dueling sense of contraction and expansion. Simultaneously, the delineative arrangement exemplified by the uniform width of the bands, coupled with Stella’s precise modulation of tonal values, converges space together into a single planar surface. The curves of the shaped canvas allows these forms to radiate outwards, extending the already impressive composition even further into the viewer’s space and hinting at Stella’s later works, which begin to question the arbitrary distinction between painting and sculpture.
After graduating from Princeton, Stella rose to prominence as a leading figure of the Minimalist movement with his Black Paintings of 1958 to 1960. Into the next decade, Stella prosperously expanded and refined upon his method becoming a skillful colorist, always mindful that his paintings remain adamantly non-referential and abstract.
Concerned with rhythm, interval, and repetition, recurring motifs throughout his oeuvre, the present work arises out of initial drawings made on a smaller scale with the aid of a protractor, which gives the name to this outstanding body of work from the late sixties and early seventies.
The Protractor series was originally conceived as a group of thirty-one unique formats executed in three variations each, with internal structures ranging from fan-like and circular, to semicircular and interwoven.
According to art historian Gregor Stemmrich, Stella’s “calling the series ‘Protractor,’ naming it after a tool for drawing and measuring that everyone is familiar with from school, indicates that he wished to allude to Jasper John’s use of the ‘ruler’ as a tool for smearing paint into semicircles, which he used as a ‘device’ … in many paintings, in order to emphasize the flatness of the canvas and to leave no doubt about the material quality of the painting” (H. Bröker, M. Brüderlin and G. Stemmrich, Frank Stella: The Retrospective, Works 1958-2012, Ostfildern, 2012, p. 49).
Dating from 1968, just two years before Frank Stella became the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York—making Stella the youngest artist ever to receive that honor, to this day—Abra I encompasses the conceptual and aesthetic concerns that have characterized the very best of the artist’s output.
This body of work, that in most instances bears the names of Islamic cities as titles, was deeply influenced by the artist’s visit to Asia Minor, where he travelled in 1963 with his dear friend and then Metropolitan Museum of Art curator Henry Geldzahler and art collectors Stanley and Shirley Woodward.
During this time, Stella was fascinated by the circular layouts of many of the cities he visited. This inspiration can be found not only in the names of the paintings, but within the curvilinear forms that weave together in Abra I, reminiscent of Islamic arabesque motifs.
As Robert Rosenblum noted, “The springing vaults of the arcs, some reaching as high as four feet above one's head, turn the painting into something that verges on the architectural, a work that might rest on the floor and be subject to natural physical laws of load and support. Seen on this immense scale, the thrusts and counterthrusts, the taut and perfect spanning of great spaces, the razor-sharp interlocking of points of stress all contrive to plunge the observer into a dizzying tour-de-force of aesthetic engineering.” (R. Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Baltimore, 1971, p. 49)
The conformation of Abra I represents the culmination of this effort to shift the focus of painting from representation to bodily experience, drawing the eye to the center of the composition and creating a dueling sense of contraction and expansion. Simultaneously, the delineative arrangement exemplified by the uniform width of the bands, coupled with Stella’s precise modulation of tonal values, converges space together into a single planar surface. The curves of the shaped canvas allows these forms to radiate outwards, extending the already impressive composition even further into the viewer’s space and hinting at Stella’s later works, which begin to question the arbitrary distinction between painting and sculpture.