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拍品专文
Although Frank Stella had rejected circular forms in his early career, pursuing compositions that famously denounced the New York school of Abstract Expressionism, in 1967 he embarked on the Protractor Series, a set of ninety-three unique paintings, three variations each of thirty-one forms. The artist used the half-circle, the shape of a protractor, as the basic building unit for these canvases. Similarly to a single protractor, all but three forms from the series grow up from a flat bottom and the manipulations of this form led to the creation of a body of work with a strong architectural emphasis. Robert Rosenblum has noted of a work from this series,"...the springing vaults of the arcs, some reaching as high as four feet above one's head, turn the paining 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 contrast to plunge the observer into a dizzying tour-de-force of aesthetic engineering" (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970, New York, p. 134).
Stella's interest in Islamic art and travels in the Near East inspired him to title the thirty-one templates from this series after ancient circular cities in Asia Minor, Islamic cities and, as illustrated in the present lot, the gateways of Madinat as-Salam, or Baghdad, commonly known as the "round city." The Roman numeral following these city or gate names denotes which of three designs that the artist applied to the shaped canvas: "interlaces," "rainbows" and "fans." Khurasan Gate III, demonstrates Stella's fan motif, with strong wedges of color that are also a departure from his earlier, black, monochrome works. Stella himself has attributed the work of both Robert Delaunay and Henri Matisse as being influential on these motifs, "There are some overtones of Orphic Cubism that get into the picture as a result of the sheer geometry of the protractor" (ibid, p. 149). In this example, wedges of the "fan" produce a continued rhythmic pattern of contours and angles that allow Stella to achieve his ultimate goal of creating a painting that can be viewed as a an object of pure abstraction.
Stella's interest in Islamic art and travels in the Near East inspired him to title the thirty-one templates from this series after ancient circular cities in Asia Minor, Islamic cities and, as illustrated in the present lot, the gateways of Madinat as-Salam, or Baghdad, commonly known as the "round city." The Roman numeral following these city or gate names denotes which of three designs that the artist applied to the shaped canvas: "interlaces," "rainbows" and "fans." Khurasan Gate III, demonstrates Stella's fan motif, with strong wedges of color that are also a departure from his earlier, black, monochrome works. Stella himself has attributed the work of both Robert Delaunay and Henri Matisse as being influential on these motifs, "There are some overtones of Orphic Cubism that get into the picture as a result of the sheer geometry of the protractor" (ibid, p. 149). In this example, wedges of the "fan" produce a continued rhythmic pattern of contours and angles that allow Stella to achieve his ultimate goal of creating a painting that can be viewed as a an object of pure abstraction.