Frank Stella

Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles
Private Collection, New York
Lo Giudice Gallery, Chicago
Lewis and Susan Manilow, Chicago
Christie's, New York, November 7, 1989, lot 26
Ito Gallery, Seijo
Acquired by the present owner from the above

Fortín de las Flores is a classic example of Stella's Mitered Maze series in which, along with the Concentric Square paintings, Stella addressed the matter of multi-color optics and illusionistic depth. In 1961-1962, Stella painted the Benjamin Moore canvases, refering to the brand of alkyd house paint used for the series. Like Stella's other paintings of the period, these canvases were monochromatic but the series encompassed all of the main primary and secondary colors - red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. Typical of Stella's exhaustive methodology, the paintings were all based on one of six distinct linear patterns to correspond to the six colors in the series. 

With the Mitered Mazes and Concentric Squares, Stella expanded on the compositions of two of the Benjamin Moore Paintings to reintroduce color balances and spatial illusion into his oeuvre. The configuration of Island No. 10,  with its diminishing square-within-a square composition, implied a spatial dimension and was the basis for the Concentric Square paintings. By adding different color tonalities, the sense of shapes receding or projecting from the canvas surface was further amplified. As for the multi-colored Mitered Mazes such as Fortín de las Flores, based on the 1961 Benjamin Moore painting titled New Madrid, ``the mitered corners produce in each case a pair of diagonals, one continuous and the other broken, which create the sensation that we are seeing, as [Robert] Rosenblum puts it, `These fictive ziggurats, protruding or receding, become still more complicated when adapted to the earlier maze form.'   Perhaps the most appealing works in these two series are the paired mazes.  Rosenblum continues: `...Stella pairs two of these mazes to produce an even more vibrant optical effect in which two points of focus compete for attention.' '' ( Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: an Illustrated Biography, New York, 1995, p. 74)

The composition of Fortín de las Flores was also used by Stella for his contribution to the ten prints and multiples in the portfolio Ten from Leo Castelli in 1967. A second version was created by the artist as an offset lithograph for the four-part series Jasper's Dilemma in 1973.