Mantenela I

Frank Stella's impressive Mantenela I is a dazzling large-scale example from the artist's Protractor Series, which he began in the summer of 1967. Painted in 1968 on a monumental scale, the painting displays a confidence and bravado that characterizes the best paintings from this series. Stella skillfully arranged a series of colored bands in arching, curvilinear forms within a massive, hand-constructed, shaped canvas. Thick bands of color are so masterfully rendered as to appear mass-produced, yet Stella painstakingly painted each one, the size of which was dictated by the width of his brush.

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 feverishly expanded and refined upon his method, always insistent that his paintings remain firmly non-referential and solely abstract. Stella is a skillful colorist, and Mantenela I demonstrates a new boldness in terms of its color combinations. Stella's use of color emerged in the 1960's with his Benjamin Moore series, for which he chose only six Benjamin Moore paint colors: the primary colors of red, yellow and blue, and the secondary colors orange, green and purple. By the late 1960s -- as Mantenela I demonstrates -- Stella began to incorporate more transitional colors, which allowed more subtlety in his color changes, all of which furthered the color theory and compositional theory of his paintings. The colors vibrate and pulse with a palpable intensity.

With the Protractor Series, Stella introduced curvilinear forms for the first time, the importance of which is iterated by the title of the series itself. The lunging half-circles of Mantenela I might recall Romanesque architecture. Stella recalls, "I was brought up in Malden, Mass., and when I was very, very young, I went to classes at the H.H. Richardson-designed library there. It was this beautiful place with incredible split levels. I had an early sense of the stone and the weight-what I later found out to be Romanesque architecture. It was really brutal and good, and I loved it" (F. Stella, 29 May 2007, reprinted on https://www.artinfo.com/news/story/25134/frank-stella/)

When asked about the relevance of abstraction today, Stella has remarked:

"I was born into it, as it were. And abstraction seems to me to have the greatest potential, in all honesty. If you look at the history of the twentieth century, you have abstraction and you have representation. The great artists who revolutionized what would turn out to be the older tradition - Picasso, Matisse, and Mir - produced great, great painting. But they were side by side with Kandinsky, Malevich, and Mondrian. So, although the balance shifted over to the representational side for a time, the end result was that the best painting that happened in the second half of the twentieth century came out of abstraction. And although there's still plenty of representational art, and it can be good, it doesn't carry the directness and the force and the import that abstraction does. Abstraction is what I like, and it's what I feel I should do. I feel left with it. I feel responsible." (F. Stella, quoted in an interview with Robert Ayers, reprinted on https://www.askyfilledwithshootingstars.com/wordpress/?p=638).