Frank Stella

Gallery 99, Bay Harbor Islands, Florida
Acquired by the present owner from the above

This work is in very good condition. There is light surface soiling concentrated at the edges. In the lower right quadrant there are scattered, unobtrusive white scuff marks. As well, in the lower right corner, there is a white scuff mark in the red band. There is no apparent restoration visible under ultra-violet light. Unframed.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

The 1970s were watershed years of artistic creativity and productivity for Frank Stella.  During this time he developed several major bodies of work, which included the Diderot series, the largest of the Concentric Square pictures to date.  On a terrific scale, works from the Diderot Series still stressed the reduction of the image to its most basic elements of color, shape and design whilst protracting and retracting to its common center, fundamental to Stella's aesthetic concerns as realized in the geometric variations of his earlier, intimate, Concentric Squares.  However, in order to accommodate the large scale, Stella does not simply enlarge the width of the bands in proportion to the enlarged size of the fields in the Diderot pictures. Instead, Stella retains the same band width he had used in the earlier smaller paintings and he increased the numbers of bands thereby punctuating the compelling size of the paintings. As such, Scramble: Descending Yellow Values / Ascending Spectrum, 1977 is congruent to the monumental Diderot series not only due for the visual excitement established by the scale differential of the Diderot to its Concentric Square predecessors. This adapted technique also enabled Stella to more precisely subdivide hue and value as evinced in Scramble: Descending Yellow Values / Ascending Spectrum. In this work, Stella continues to favor the systemic use of both color and value scales whereby his color sequences are extracted from the hues of the color wheel and a division of the gray scale was made to correspond to it in number. "The effect of doing it by the numbers, so to say, gave me a king of guide in my work as a whole. Everything else, everything that was freer and less sequential, had to be at least as good -and that would be no mean achievement...[creating] a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard". (William Rubin, Exh. Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, 1987, p.48)