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拍品專文
Executed in 1960, Greek Key represents an iconic example from Frank Stella’s Aluminum Paintings series that expands upon his exploration of post-painterly abstraction first realized through his Black Paintings exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art the year before in a group exhibition, entitled “Sixteen Americans.” This show featured the work of Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Rauschenberg, and resulted in the museum’s first purchase of Stella’s work with its acquisition of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor in 1959.
Stella pushed the inorganic coldness embodied in the rigid linearity and monochromatic palate of his Black Paintings a step further with his selection of aluminum paint, which he originally discovered on the sample cards of commercial paint dealers. This “readymade” pigment produced a surface that was flatter, colder and more inanimate than the Black Paintings; a surface that, in the words of Stella, “wouldn’t give in, and would have less soft, landscape-like or naturalistic space in it” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 63). While the Black Paintings with their high contrasts recalled the chiaroscuro of classical painting and the chalky stripes incised into rich black conjured organic elements such as ash and charcoal, the achromatic metallic surfaces of the Aluminum Paintings found no analogues in the natural world or precedents in art history. Instead, the viewer found only a mazelike form, such as
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty reformatted into a grid, floating in a mercurial void. It was a surface that immediately evoked associations with the mechanical and factory produced, from the car fenders to kitchen appliances. One of the most significant aspects of the present lot relate to how the contents of the painting relate to their support, which equates to one of Stella’s most revolutionary contributions to the field of painting and one that would be rehearsed more conspicuously in his paintings. The square outline of the coiled stripes serves to emphasize, through repetition, the format of the frame drawing the viewer’s attention to the patent and timeless artifice of painting, a reality that artist’s had been seeking to overcome arguably since the advent of painting.
The concentricities of stripes, rendered in create “the illusion of a very shallow, but tightly controlled ripple in the space” (op. cit.) that imbues the painting with an energy that complicates its otherwise static appearance. Depending on the angle of light, the metallic surfaces between the borders of unprimed lines can acquire an almost topographic quality suggesting a series of ridges or depressions. These dichotomies between the painterly and the mechanical, inertia and motion, and flatness and depth, suffuse Stella’s work with a dynamism that continues to enthrall art lovers over 50 years after its creation. While artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko are deservingly admired for their highly expressive gestural paintings that conveyed the maker’s existential quandaries
and intimate emotions, Stella warrants equal praise for the iconoclastic “coolness” and quiet restraint—a vision that forever changed the trajectory of art.
Stella pushed the inorganic coldness embodied in the rigid linearity and monochromatic palate of his Black Paintings a step further with his selection of aluminum paint, which he originally discovered on the sample cards of commercial paint dealers. This “readymade” pigment produced a surface that was flatter, colder and more inanimate than the Black Paintings; a surface that, in the words of Stella, “wouldn’t give in, and would have less soft, landscape-like or naturalistic space in it” (W. Rubin, Frank Stella, New York, 1970, p. 63). While the Black Paintings with their high contrasts recalled the chiaroscuro of classical painting and the chalky stripes incised into rich black conjured organic elements such as ash and charcoal, the achromatic metallic surfaces of the Aluminum Paintings found no analogues in the natural world or precedents in art history. Instead, the viewer found only a mazelike form, such as
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty reformatted into a grid, floating in a mercurial void. It was a surface that immediately evoked associations with the mechanical and factory produced, from the car fenders to kitchen appliances. One of the most significant aspects of the present lot relate to how the contents of the painting relate to their support, which equates to one of Stella’s most revolutionary contributions to the field of painting and one that would be rehearsed more conspicuously in his paintings. The square outline of the coiled stripes serves to emphasize, through repetition, the format of the frame drawing the viewer’s attention to the patent and timeless artifice of painting, a reality that artist’s had been seeking to overcome arguably since the advent of painting.
The concentricities of stripes, rendered in create “the illusion of a very shallow, but tightly controlled ripple in the space” (op. cit.) that imbues the painting with an energy that complicates its otherwise static appearance. Depending on the angle of light, the metallic surfaces between the borders of unprimed lines can acquire an almost topographic quality suggesting a series of ridges or depressions. These dichotomies between the painterly and the mechanical, inertia and motion, and flatness and depth, suffuse Stella’s work with a dynamism that continues to enthrall art lovers over 50 years after its creation. While artists like Jackson Pollock and Mark
Rothko are deservingly admired for their highly expressive gestural paintings that conveyed the maker’s existential quandaries
and intimate emotions, Stella warrants equal praise for the iconoclastic “coolness” and quiet restraint—a vision that forever changed the trajectory of art.