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Lot Essay
‘Abstraction in the 20th century is dependent on cubism, which is arranging planes in space, but the planes are arranged in a kind of stiff and geometric kind of way. Once the planes begin to bend and curve and deform then you get into what happens in Moby Dick - it’s a way of opening things up for abstraction.’
–Frank Stella
Shattering the technicolour painted surface into a matrix of interlocking, jagged and curving planes, Frank Stella’s The Chart (D-14, 1X), 1990, amalgamates the lessons of painting, printmaking and sculpture into an exuberant yet cohesive unity. Over its tangle of metal sheets, Stella paints, sprays, and scribbles his design, creating a vibrant mesh of geometrical abstraction and sinuous suggestion of form. Titled after the forty-fourth chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, this work belongs to Stella’s celebrated series of the same name, in which the artist takes Melville’s text as his motif, structure and inspiration to develop an ambitious suite of some 200 metal reliefs, prints and sculptures. The triumphant culmination of years of technical experimentation, The Chart (D-14, 1X) finds equivalents in distinguished museum collections worldwide, including The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987, at the Whitney, New York; The Chase, Third Day, 1989, at the SFMOMA, San Francisco; and The Lamp, 1986, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Stella’s homage to Melville’s epic sea tale of Captain Ahab’s obsessive and finally destructive quest for the great white whale, Moby Dick, represents a conscious continuation of the well-established allegiance between myth and the art of the Abstract Expressionists. Jackson Pollock also invoked the foundational American saga in his early, semi-figural paintings such as Blue (Moby Dick), 1943. Despite Stella’s own continued commitment to abstraction, The Chart also begins to reveal figurative elements: a flicking, white fishtail, the arresting, blunt-headed silhouette of a single white whale, and, falling to the left of this polychrome tempest, the threatening sharp point of a harpoon. This bold positioning of disparate forms makes direct reference to Wassily Kandinsky’s system of composition, where narrative fragments are interspersed among more spontaneous forms. In doing so, Stella hoped to create ‘a particular impression which is our time’s version of Melville’ (F. Stella, quoted in R. K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words & Shapes, New York 2006, p. 33). Rich in allusion and complex in execution, The Chart (D-14, 1X) is a vivid collage of unpredictable form which despite fluent unity, retains both a jangling, dynamic tension, and the elusive suggestion of narrative play.
–Frank Stella
Shattering the technicolour painted surface into a matrix of interlocking, jagged and curving planes, Frank Stella’s The Chart (D-14, 1X), 1990, amalgamates the lessons of painting, printmaking and sculpture into an exuberant yet cohesive unity. Over its tangle of metal sheets, Stella paints, sprays, and scribbles his design, creating a vibrant mesh of geometrical abstraction and sinuous suggestion of form. Titled after the forty-fourth chapter of Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick, this work belongs to Stella’s celebrated series of the same name, in which the artist takes Melville’s text as his motif, structure and inspiration to develop an ambitious suite of some 200 metal reliefs, prints and sculptures. The triumphant culmination of years of technical experimentation, The Chart (D-14, 1X) finds equivalents in distinguished museum collections worldwide, including The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987, at the Whitney, New York; The Chase, Third Day, 1989, at the SFMOMA, San Francisco; and The Lamp, 1986, at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Stella’s homage to Melville’s epic sea tale of Captain Ahab’s obsessive and finally destructive quest for the great white whale, Moby Dick, represents a conscious continuation of the well-established allegiance between myth and the art of the Abstract Expressionists. Jackson Pollock also invoked the foundational American saga in his early, semi-figural paintings such as Blue (Moby Dick), 1943. Despite Stella’s own continued commitment to abstraction, The Chart also begins to reveal figurative elements: a flicking, white fishtail, the arresting, blunt-headed silhouette of a single white whale, and, falling to the left of this polychrome tempest, the threatening sharp point of a harpoon. This bold positioning of disparate forms makes direct reference to Wassily Kandinsky’s system of composition, where narrative fragments are interspersed among more spontaneous forms. In doing so, Stella hoped to create ‘a particular impression which is our time’s version of Melville’ (F. Stella, quoted in R. K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words & Shapes, New York 2006, p. 33). Rich in allusion and complex in execution, The Chart (D-14, 1X) is a vivid collage of unpredictable form which despite fluent unity, retains both a jangling, dynamic tension, and the elusive suggestion of narrative play.