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Lot Essay
Painted in 1964, Slieve More belongs to a group of nine works which Frank Stella called his Notched V Paintings. All the canvases are shaped as a single V which the artist intended to be hung in any direction (except as a direct inversion) in singles like the present work or in combination with other V shaped canvases such as in the magnificent Empress of India (Museum of Modern Art, New York). In Slieve More, eighteen stripes of lustrous silver metallic paint converge on a single point at the base of the shaped canvas. Each of these exact bands of metallic paint is separated by a thin strip of raw canvas, unprimed and with only a thin graphite running down the center of each block. Unlike Stella’s earlier square canvases, the shape of the Notched V paintings introduces a dynamism that had not been present in Stella’s work up until this point. As scholar Robert Rosenbaum points out, “…the wedge shaped canvas, with its swift ascent of convergent (or descent of divergent) stripes, is almost a twentieth-century symbol for abstract, mechanized speed, whose lineage could be traced through the streamlining in commercial machine design of the 1920s and 1930s (in everything from hubcaps to refrigerators) back to the ‘lines of force’ in Italian Futurist art” (R. Rosenbaum, Frank Stella, New York, p. 36). Indeed, this notion of speed could well have been in the artist’s mind as the title of this painting, along with a sister work, the Slieve Bawn, is taken from the names of two nineteenth century clipper ships built by the legendary Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast (home to the RMS Titanic). The clipper ships were among the fastest vessels of their day and were used to transport goods quickly around the world.
Stella’s Notched V Paintings followed on from his earlier interventions in the previously sacrosanct nature of the square or rectangular shaped canvas. Beginning in 1960 with his Aluminum Paintings, Stella began to insert a series of notches into the stretcher to produce irregular shaped edges to the canvas. With his Copper Paintings of 1960-61, these notches grew into larger interventions which radically altered the structure of the canvas turning them into crosses, H or T shaped canvases. However, these were still based on the geometric square or rectangle, and it is only with his paintings from 1963 and 1964 that he appears to have fully relinquished the dominance of the square canvas.
This disruption to the hallowed notion of a square or rectangular canvas became one of the artist’s preeminent concerns as he strived to abandon many of the traditional methods of painting. Curator Michael Auping acknowledged that Stella’s Aluminum Paintings were “seminal in the development of a broader investigation of non-traditional canvases” (M. Auping, “The Phenomenology of Frank/”The Materiality and Gesture Make Space,” in Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 18). Indeed, Lawrence Alloway, the organizer of the seminal 1964 exhibition The Shaped Canvas at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, saw that these revolutionary shaped canvases became much more integral to the work of art as a whole and something more than mere surface on which to place paint. “A number of artists in the show,” Alloway wrote, “saw shape as style, a new way to make an abstract image. Stella understood shape in the larger context of architecture, that shapes were just units in a systematic process of building material to engage space by incrementally filing it or enclosing it” (L. Alloway, quoted by M. Auping, “The Phenomenology of Frank/”The Materiality and Gesture Make Space,” in Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 19).
In addition to the carefully constructed nature of the canvas itself, the precision with which Stella applied his painted surfaces reinforces the architectural nature of the painting. The pristine nature of the silver-colored pigment sitting on top of the raw canvas, the clean lines where the pigment meets the canvas and the thin graphite lines that run down the resulting void and even the lack of any visible brush work results in an almost three-dimensional surface, as curator William Rubin explained, “The paint itself sits on the weave of the canvas, but the metallic particles radiate a sheen of light that seems almost independent of the body of color, as if situated ever so slightly in front of the canvas itself. The effect of this sheen is…to produce a kind of uniform luminosity—a tonal unity…” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 92).
The precision that is inherent in Stella’s canvases and the artist’s interest in the objecthood of paintings rather than representation, has led to him being regarded as an precursor to artists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre. In stark contrast to his Abstract Expressionist forefathers, Stella’s purposeful lack of spirituality, individuality, and physicality in his early work finds kinship with the nascent stages of Minimalism. Indeed Carl Andre, one of the founding fathers of the movement, identified Stella’s work as having much in common with theirs, saying “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting….His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas” (C. Andre, quoted in A. D. Weinberg, “The End Depends Upon the Beginning,” in M. Auping, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 1). Stella’s refusal to use non-traditional forms of paint (here he used new forms of chemically advanced paints instead of oil or acrylic) deployed paint as if it were a found industrial object rather than a fine arts material, inspiring critics such as Donald Judd to point out Stella’s Duchampian affinity, “The bare lines of the canvas between the bands of aluminum paint follow the indentations in the side of the canvas,” he wrote about the Aluminum Paintings in 1963, “It is something of an object, it is a single thing, not a field with something on it…” (D. Judd, Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, 1975, p. 91). Indeed, as Rosenbaum points “…even the icy colors (produced now through metallic powder in polymer emulsion) conform to this mechanized imagery that provides, as it were, an abstract counterpart to the more explicit use of industrial reproductive techniques (Ben-Day dots, commercial paints, stencils) in much Pop art of the mid-1960s (R. Rosenbaum, op. cit.).
Recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Stella is widely regarded as one of the postwar period’s most revered artists. His assertion that painting should not be based on illusionistic pretense inspired a generation of artists and still reverberates today. Speaking in 1966 he famously said of his work, “I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the ‘old values’ in painting—the ‘humanistic’ values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W.S. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 41-42).
Stella’s Notched V Paintings followed on from his earlier interventions in the previously sacrosanct nature of the square or rectangular shaped canvas. Beginning in 1960 with his Aluminum Paintings, Stella began to insert a series of notches into the stretcher to produce irregular shaped edges to the canvas. With his Copper Paintings of 1960-61, these notches grew into larger interventions which radically altered the structure of the canvas turning them into crosses, H or T shaped canvases. However, these were still based on the geometric square or rectangle, and it is only with his paintings from 1963 and 1964 that he appears to have fully relinquished the dominance of the square canvas.
This disruption to the hallowed notion of a square or rectangular canvas became one of the artist’s preeminent concerns as he strived to abandon many of the traditional methods of painting. Curator Michael Auping acknowledged that Stella’s Aluminum Paintings were “seminal in the development of a broader investigation of non-traditional canvases” (M. Auping, “The Phenomenology of Frank/”The Materiality and Gesture Make Space,” in Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 18). Indeed, Lawrence Alloway, the organizer of the seminal 1964 exhibition The Shaped Canvas at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, saw that these revolutionary shaped canvases became much more integral to the work of art as a whole and something more than mere surface on which to place paint. “A number of artists in the show,” Alloway wrote, “saw shape as style, a new way to make an abstract image. Stella understood shape in the larger context of architecture, that shapes were just units in a systematic process of building material to engage space by incrementally filing it or enclosing it” (L. Alloway, quoted by M. Auping, “The Phenomenology of Frank/”The Materiality and Gesture Make Space,” in Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 19).
In addition to the carefully constructed nature of the canvas itself, the precision with which Stella applied his painted surfaces reinforces the architectural nature of the painting. The pristine nature of the silver-colored pigment sitting on top of the raw canvas, the clean lines where the pigment meets the canvas and the thin graphite lines that run down the resulting void and even the lack of any visible brush work results in an almost three-dimensional surface, as curator William Rubin explained, “The paint itself sits on the weave of the canvas, but the metallic particles radiate a sheen of light that seems almost independent of the body of color, as if situated ever so slightly in front of the canvas itself. The effect of this sheen is…to produce a kind of uniform luminosity—a tonal unity…” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 92).
The precision that is inherent in Stella’s canvases and the artist’s interest in the objecthood of paintings rather than representation, has led to him being regarded as an precursor to artists like Donald Judd and Carl Andre. In stark contrast to his Abstract Expressionist forefathers, Stella’s purposeful lack of spirituality, individuality, and physicality in his early work finds kinship with the nascent stages of Minimalism. Indeed Carl Andre, one of the founding fathers of the movement, identified Stella’s work as having much in common with theirs, saying “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting….His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas” (C. Andre, quoted in A. D. Weinberg, “The End Depends Upon the Beginning,” in M. Auping, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, exh. cat., Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2015, p. 1). Stella’s refusal to use non-traditional forms of paint (here he used new forms of chemically advanced paints instead of oil or acrylic) deployed paint as if it were a found industrial object rather than a fine arts material, inspiring critics such as Donald Judd to point out Stella’s Duchampian affinity, “The bare lines of the canvas between the bands of aluminum paint follow the indentations in the side of the canvas,” he wrote about the Aluminum Paintings in 1963, “It is something of an object, it is a single thing, not a field with something on it…” (D. Judd, Donald Judd: Complete Writings 1959-1975, Halifax, 1975, p. 91). Indeed, as Rosenbaum points “…even the icy colors (produced now through metallic powder in polymer emulsion) conform to this mechanized imagery that provides, as it were, an abstract counterpart to the more explicit use of industrial reproductive techniques (Ben-Day dots, commercial paints, stencils) in much Pop art of the mid-1960s (R. Rosenbaum, op. cit.).
Recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, Stella is widely regarded as one of the postwar period’s most revered artists. His assertion that painting should not be based on illusionistic pretense inspired a generation of artists and still reverberates today. Speaking in 1966 he famously said of his work, “I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the ‘old values’ in painting—the ‘humanistic’ values that they always find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough or right enough, you would just be able to look at it. All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see” (F. Stella, quoted in W.S. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, pp. 41-42).