
A gift from the artist himself to the current owner, Frank Stella’s Untitled (Study for MoMA Poster) offers a prototypical example of the artist’s hand on an intimate scale while simultaneously embodying his iconic rationalist depiction of form. In 1970, the Museum of Modern Art opened Frank Stella’s retrospective—he was the youngest artist to ever have a retrospective at the Museum at that time and remains the youngest to this day. As its title suggests, Untitled (Study for MoMA Poster) was a study for the exhibition poster, which alludes to the striking, symmetrical style of Copper paintings series Stella had devised in the early 1960s. Modeled after Stella's masterpiece Ouray, Untitled (Study for MoMA Poster) represents the artist returning to his previous work as meditative exercise in preparation for his forthcoming major museum retrospective. An important work within the artist's practice and identity, Stella later created a suite of prints based on Ouray that parallel the present work. The authoritative, repeated bands and Suprematist-reminiscent form transcend relationality and symbolize the artist’s contribution to the American artistic canon and his own exploration of his greatest works: a fitting theme in the schema of the artist’s reflection on his own retrospective.

In the wake of the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, Frank Stella emerged in the New York art scene with a new visual vocabulary, which gravitated away from disordered abstraction and moved towards a flattened mode of artistic creation that was facilitated by his use of the economical tools and techniques of house painters. Successfully achieving a new mode of abstraction, which removed the Romanticism that characterized Abstract Expressionists, Stella’s works from this time had the capacity to take on new forms while remaining anchored within their own field. Untitled (Study for MoMA Poster) alludes to the artist’s calculated compositional breakthroughs with its centralized, mesmerizing vanishing point. The graphic tenets of Stella’s practice are visible in his use of positive and negative space. Untitled (Study for MoMA Poster) is an emblem of the artist’s idiosyncratic style and his innovations within the context of abstract art and is a relic of one of the most important moments in both the artist’s career and art history at large.