Frank Stella

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York
Dean Swanson, Minneapolis
Christie's, New York, May 18, 1979, Lot 112
Maxwell Davidson Gallery, New York
Private Collection, Europe
Sotheby's, New York, May 9, 1984, Lot 34
Private Collection, New York
Christie's, New York, November 21, 1996, Lot 154
Acquired by the present owner from the above sale

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Delaware Crossing, from 1967 is directly related to the artist's celebrated Benjamin Moore Paintings series which began in 1961.  The title refers to the brand name of the paint used: Benjamin Moore alkyd house paint.  In this early series, Stella completed six canvases approximately six-and-a-half feet square which were exhibited in his first one man show at Galerie Lawrence in Paris in the same year.  Each painting employs one of six distinct patterns and one of the six primary or secondary colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple.  In addition, Stella painted small versions of each pattern in each color: thirty six different paintings in all.  The series employs a systemic use of both color and varying patterns.  The present painting is a superb example of how the artist re-visited an earlier triumph in painting by altering and changing aspects to meet the needs of the present day.  The use of hot pink six years after the original series was completed is a fascinating look at the inner workings of Stella, an extraordinary genius who was christened "the father of Minimalism" and yet was able to move beyond minimalism to create an entirely new type of art.

All of the works in the Benjamin Moore Paintings series are titled after familiar locales known to the artist, including Hampton Roads, Island No. 10, New Madrid, Palmito Ranch and Sabine Pass as well as the present painting, Delaware Crossing.   In William Rubin's words, "there are in Stella's art—and it is an aspect of its relative accessibility—the vestiges of a certain banality.  Yet it is precisely when life's commonplaces are amplified by the spirit of genius that the truly universal work of art is born." (Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, October 1987 - August 1989, p.7)    

As Robert Rosenblum notes, "in many ways these paintings of 1961 are the most hermetic and the least visually and emotionally seductive of any of Stella's early work.  Lacking the dark, enigmatic drama of the Black Paintings or the startling unfamiliarity of the metallic hues and new shapes of the Aluminum, Copper and Lavender canvases, they may appear exasperatingly simple and mute.  Yet again, following that tradition in modern painting which makes us look all the harder at a [Piet] Mondrian or a [Barnett] Newman, if we are to look at their work at all, these paintings force the spectator to consider the most elementary pictorial facts, where of color or of pattern, and to sense, with the artist, the Eureka quality of beauty to be discerned in these foundation stones of picture-making.  And inevitably, this reduction of vocabulary obliges the viewer to register the subtlest variations in surface and texture, almost totally concealed in photographic reproduction...It should be said swiftly, however, that the fact that these paintings contain literally fewer pictorial elements does not make them necessarily simpler or easier, any more than Mondrian's or Newman's sparest paintings are simpler or easier than their works with more complex vocabularies.  Similarly, though modern criticism keeps referring to these purifying impulses in twentieth-century art as economical, reductive, or even destructive, the artists themselves would quite rightly insist that they were creating something positive and constructive, richer indeed than more overtly intricate works." (Robert Rosenblum, Penguin New Art 1, Frank Stella, Baltimore, 1971, p. 29)