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拍品专文
“I would consider that the best of the metal reliefs of recent years are superior even to the finest paintings of the early sixties. And with the prospect of decades of development lying ahead, one can imagine that there is still greater and more unexpected work to come”
—William Rubin, Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987.
Frank Stella’s Fedallah is towering example of the artist’s constantly evolving artistic practice. Having established himself firmly in the art historical canon in the 1960s with his iconic Black Paintings, throughout his career Stella has sought to constantly push the accepted norms of artistic production. Named after a character in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick, this dynamic arrangement of chromatic metallic planes breaches the hallowed divide between sculpture and painting. For as these dynamic planes are unashamedly three-dimensional, their surface also bears witness to Stella’s actions as a painter, hosting a dazzling array of colorful daubs, drips and tantalizing brushwork. Melville was a representational writer who became increasingly abstracted in his descriptions of his noble whale, and in works such as Fedallah, it has been said that Stella was an abstract painter who was beginning to explore the introduction of figuration, as the artist himself said, “in the right hands representational painting can be abstract enough” (F. Stella, quoted by R. K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby Dick: Words & Shapes, New York, 2006, p. 9).
At over 7 feet tall, Stella’s arrangement of colorful metal forms, carefully ‘woven’ together, creates a work of sensual complexity. These are not the crushed fenders of John Chamberlain’s large scale metal sculptures of the 1960s whose final form owed much to his embrace of chance, Stella’s forms are energy personified, highly controlled planes of milled and cut steel, placed exactly to the artist’s specifications. Although resolutely abstract, these shapes do evoke the figurative form, even the spectral silhouette of Fedallah himself, as described by Melville “…here come that ghost-devil Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual; oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it!” (H. Melville, Moby Dick, New York, 2003, p. 503). The careful layering of these chromatic planes creates spaces and voids deep within the body of the sculpture, visible through a circular opening cut into one of the leftmost panels—creating a window which allows the viewer to journey directly into the heart of the work. These are not forgotten areas however, they are an essential part of the artist’s kaleidoscope of form and color, as intricately worked as the outer surfaces yet offering an intriguing insight into Stella’s compositional strategies. Looking deep into the interior reveals surfaces covered with geometric patterns that recall earlier series of Stella’s work. Just like its “fire-worshipping” namesake, Fedallah’s painterly surface is burnished by an array of hot and cold hues. Topped with a ‘mask’ of golden yellow, the vibrant palette pervades throughout—scorching reds and hot pinks are counterbalanced with internal passages of cool blue.
Stella takes the title of Fedallah from a character in Melville’s heroic novel Moby-Dick. First published in 1851, and now widely considered to be among the finest works of American literature, the book tells the story of mad Captain Ahab’s journey to track the epic whale he encountered on a previous journey. Fedallah is the leader of the five dusky phantoms, whom Ahab has secretly brought onboard to serve as his private boat crew, and who also serves as the captain's harpooner. Stella read Moby-Dick as a youngster, about the time he also saw the film version directed by John Houston, but was not impressed. It would not be until 30 years later when he took his two young sons to see the Beluga whales at the New York Aquarium in 1985 that it stirred his imagination. “The first thing we saw every time we went into the aquarium were the Beluga whales in the tank just as you came right in the door,” he said. “They were just sort of looming over you, as it were. I just kept seeing them for about two years, and then one day the wave forms and the whales started to come together as an idea” (F. Stella, quoted by R. K. Wallace, ibid., p. 7). Thus began the artist’s most ambitious series of work. Over the next 12 years Stella produced 167 compositions in total, each named after chapters in Melville’s book. Whilst not seeking to be a direct interpretation of Moby-Dick, Stella was more interested in the hybrid structure of the novel. Such is the importance of this series within the artist’s oeuvre, other examples are included in many important museum collections including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (The Chase. Third Day, 1989), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (The Lamp, 1986).
One could draw parallels between Stella’s career and that of Picasso, an artist once described as being “…more completely himself in three dimensions; a magician, a magpie genius, a comedic entertainer and a tinkerer with superb reflexes. His many gifts—versatility, voraciousness, a need for constant reinvention—are more sharply apparent in real space and tangibles (R. Smith, “Picasso Sculpture,” New York Times, Friday, September 11, 2015). Like Picasso, critics have celebrated Stella’s sculptural work as the natural progression of his early prodigious career. Indeed, William Rubin, the influential curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was so taken by a visit to Stella’s studio in 1987 that he enthused: “Standing amid the dozens of paper models that represent the second group of new paintings…during a recent visit to Stella’s studio,” he enthused, “I could not but be overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of his ideas, and the immense outpouring of energy on which they ride. At fifty-one, Stella seems to me even more inspired, and to be living more dangerously, than at thirty-three, his age at the time of his first Museum of Modern Art retrospective. The catalogue of that exhibition ended with the observation that Stella’s ‘endurance faces many challenges, not the least of which is the quality of his own past.’ In the interim, he has more than met the test. Indeed, though it smacks of comparing apples and oranges, I would consider that the best of the metal reliefs of recent years are superior even to the finest paintings of the early sixties. And with the prospect of decades of development lying ahead, one can imagine that there is still greater and more unexpected work to come. Certainly no painter has ever committed himself more completely in the quest to ‘make it better’” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 149).
—William Rubin, Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987.
Frank Stella’s Fedallah is towering example of the artist’s constantly evolving artistic practice. Having established himself firmly in the art historical canon in the 1960s with his iconic Black Paintings, throughout his career Stella has sought to constantly push the accepted norms of artistic production. Named after a character in Herman Melville’s epic novel Moby-Dick, this dynamic arrangement of chromatic metallic planes breaches the hallowed divide between sculpture and painting. For as these dynamic planes are unashamedly three-dimensional, their surface also bears witness to Stella’s actions as a painter, hosting a dazzling array of colorful daubs, drips and tantalizing brushwork. Melville was a representational writer who became increasingly abstracted in his descriptions of his noble whale, and in works such as Fedallah, it has been said that Stella was an abstract painter who was beginning to explore the introduction of figuration, as the artist himself said, “in the right hands representational painting can be abstract enough” (F. Stella, quoted by R. K. Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby Dick: Words & Shapes, New York, 2006, p. 9).
At over 7 feet tall, Stella’s arrangement of colorful metal forms, carefully ‘woven’ together, creates a work of sensual complexity. These are not the crushed fenders of John Chamberlain’s large scale metal sculptures of the 1960s whose final form owed much to his embrace of chance, Stella’s forms are energy personified, highly controlled planes of milled and cut steel, placed exactly to the artist’s specifications. Although resolutely abstract, these shapes do evoke the figurative form, even the spectral silhouette of Fedallah himself, as described by Melville “…here come that ghost-devil Fedallah; tail coiled out of sight as usual; oakum in the toes of his pumps as usual. What does he say with that look of his? Ah, only makes a sign to the sign and bows himself; there is a sun on the coin—fire worshipper, depend upon it!” (H. Melville, Moby Dick, New York, 2003, p. 503). The careful layering of these chromatic planes creates spaces and voids deep within the body of the sculpture, visible through a circular opening cut into one of the leftmost panels—creating a window which allows the viewer to journey directly into the heart of the work. These are not forgotten areas however, they are an essential part of the artist’s kaleidoscope of form and color, as intricately worked as the outer surfaces yet offering an intriguing insight into Stella’s compositional strategies. Looking deep into the interior reveals surfaces covered with geometric patterns that recall earlier series of Stella’s work. Just like its “fire-worshipping” namesake, Fedallah’s painterly surface is burnished by an array of hot and cold hues. Topped with a ‘mask’ of golden yellow, the vibrant palette pervades throughout—scorching reds and hot pinks are counterbalanced with internal passages of cool blue.
Stella takes the title of Fedallah from a character in Melville’s heroic novel Moby-Dick. First published in 1851, and now widely considered to be among the finest works of American literature, the book tells the story of mad Captain Ahab’s journey to track the epic whale he encountered on a previous journey. Fedallah is the leader of the five dusky phantoms, whom Ahab has secretly brought onboard to serve as his private boat crew, and who also serves as the captain's harpooner. Stella read Moby-Dick as a youngster, about the time he also saw the film version directed by John Houston, but was not impressed. It would not be until 30 years later when he took his two young sons to see the Beluga whales at the New York Aquarium in 1985 that it stirred his imagination. “The first thing we saw every time we went into the aquarium were the Beluga whales in the tank just as you came right in the door,” he said. “They were just sort of looming over you, as it were. I just kept seeing them for about two years, and then one day the wave forms and the whales started to come together as an idea” (F. Stella, quoted by R. K. Wallace, ibid., p. 7). Thus began the artist’s most ambitious series of work. Over the next 12 years Stella produced 167 compositions in total, each named after chapters in Melville’s book. Whilst not seeking to be a direct interpretation of Moby-Dick, Stella was more interested in the hybrid structure of the novel. Such is the importance of this series within the artist’s oeuvre, other examples are included in many important museum collections including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art (The Whiteness of the Whale, 1987), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, (The Chase. Third Day, 1989), and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (The Lamp, 1986).
One could draw parallels between Stella’s career and that of Picasso, an artist once described as being “…more completely himself in three dimensions; a magician, a magpie genius, a comedic entertainer and a tinkerer with superb reflexes. His many gifts—versatility, voraciousness, a need for constant reinvention—are more sharply apparent in real space and tangibles (R. Smith, “Picasso Sculpture,” New York Times, Friday, September 11, 2015). Like Picasso, critics have celebrated Stella’s sculptural work as the natural progression of his early prodigious career. Indeed, William Rubin, the influential curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was so taken by a visit to Stella’s studio in 1987 that he enthused: “Standing amid the dozens of paper models that represent the second group of new paintings…during a recent visit to Stella’s studio,” he enthused, “I could not but be overwhelmed by the sheer profusion of his ideas, and the immense outpouring of energy on which they ride. At fifty-one, Stella seems to me even more inspired, and to be living more dangerously, than at thirty-three, his age at the time of his first Museum of Modern Art retrospective. The catalogue of that exhibition ended with the observation that Stella’s ‘endurance faces many challenges, not the least of which is the quality of his own past.’ In the interim, he has more than met the test. Indeed, though it smacks of comparing apples and oranges, I would consider that the best of the metal reliefs of recent years are superior even to the finest paintings of the early sixties. And with the prospect of decades of development lying ahead, one can imagine that there is still greater and more unexpected work to come. Certainly no painter has ever committed himself more completely in the quest to ‘make it better’” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella 1970-1987, exh. cat., Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1987, p. 149).