Resplendent in its striking angularity, operatic scale, and incandescent gold palette, Ifafa I announces the apex of Frank Stella's radical interrogations of artwork and objecthood. Spanning over eleven feet in length, Ifafa I from 1964 is one from a limited suite of nine monumental Notched V masterworks that the artist painted from 1964-65, a revolutionary body of paintings in which the artist introduced his first V-shaped canvases. Testifying to the significance of Ifafa I, its sister painting Ifafa II is held by the Kunstmuseum Basel, with another example from this series, Empress of India, belonging to the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Ifafa I sees Stella challenge the physical limitations and theoretical confines of painting as he destabilizes the supremacy of the rectilinear canvas and introduces an unprecedented dynamism to the refined austerity of his earlier work. Making its first public appearance in over half a century, the present work, veiled in a glowing, golden luster, stands as a pillar of the most generative decade of Stella’s lauded career. Disrupting notions of flatness and form, painting and sculpture, Ifafa I not only captures Stella at his most inventive but also the seismic shifts in art history that took place in the middle of the last century.

Here, the viewer participates in Stella’s perceptual gymnastics as nineteen metallic bands lunge and dip along the length of the two composite Vs. Stella eschews the orthogonal perpendicularity of his earlier work: decisively askant, the contours of Ifafa I zip along steel colored diagonals, an illusion of motion further augmented by the shimmering gradation from gold to bronze. His progression toward the uncompromising dynamism achieved in the Notched Vs began with the Aluminum Paintings of 1960, in which square divots and apertures chiseled away at the canvases’ corners and centers. These notches were more dramatically realized in the Copper Paintings to follow, as the canvases evolved into full-fledged polygons, shaped like Hs, Ts, and Swiss crosses.

Briefly returning to the square in his Benjamin Moore Paintings of 1961 and the Concentric Squares of 1962-63, Stella returned to the shaped canvas with renewed vigor, and his interest in conjuring speed is obliquely alluded to in the titles of many of the Notched V Paintings, including the present work, which are named after British clipper ships. “The wedge shaped canvas,” Robert Rosenblum observed, “with its swift ascent of convergent (or descent of divergent) stripes, is almost a twentieth-century symbol for abstract, mechanized speed, whose lineage could be traced through the streamlining in commercial machine design of the 1920s and 1930s (in everything from hubcaps to refrigerators) back to the ‘lines of force’ in Italian Futurist art.” (Robert Rosenblum, Frank Stella, New York, 1971 p. 36)

The ribbed seams of unprimed canvas that line the surface of the present work not only contribute to its sense of movement but also declare its status as a painting. Abandoning the impassioned, improvisational immediacy of the Abstract Expressionist vocabulary championed by his contemporaries, Stella acknowledges and embraces flatness as an integral – rather than incidental – characteristic of an artwork. Just as the Abstract Expressionists were lauded by the likes of Clement Greenberg for their complete submission to the notion of painting as simply pigment on canvas, so, too, did Frank Stella literalize this concept through a completely antithetical aesthetic strategy. As Ifafa I exemplifies, he anarchically revels in a level of modularity, standardization, clarity, and calculated precision that would serve as the precursor to the work of many of the Minimalist masters, such as Donald Judd’s with his Stacks or Carl Andre’s floor sculptures.

Ifafa I’s luminous gold coloration aligns it with a wealth of art historical precedents, from Byzantine and Italian Renaissance altarpieces, to sixteenth and seventeenth century Japanese folding screens, to Gustav Klimt’s ethereal friezes, but the enormity and absolute literalism of Stella’s vectors denies us any sentimentality. In invoking such a storied lineage of art historical associations, Stella prompts a thoughtful phenomenological exercise. Ifafa I’s scale toes the line between painting and architecture, and its staunchly graphic shape challenges the viewer to see the work of art as self-conscious: of its grandeur, of its flatness, of its interruption of space and sight.

Not to be exalted or idolized, Ifafa I takes a firm stance against the narrative responsibilities of the picture plane or its debts to its artistic antecedents, instead allowing the work to stretch far beyond the confines of an easel. On this basis, Lawrence Alloway differentiated Stella from his peers, who “saw shape as style, a new way to make an abstract image. Stella understood shape in the larger context of architecture, that shapes were just units in a systematic process of building material to engage space by incrementally filing it or enclosing it.” (Lawrence Alloway quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, 2015, p. 19)

Stella’s great feat – and perhaps his own ironic in-joke – is his mobilization of geometry to undermine the elemental structures of painting itself. Thrusting with animated painterly bravado, Ifafa I showcases not only Stella’s technical prowess but his keen sensitivity to the autonomy of the work itself. At a time when the relevance of painting was hotly contested, Ifafa I offers a heroic show of what painting can and should be, and far beyond any precedent. In Ifafa I, Stella nonchalantly negotiates the coexistence of hard intellect and cool Minimalism: “Everybody was tired…” Stella recalled, “the field was sort of open. All you had to do was do it.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, 1987, p. 7)

Artist

Frank Stella