Lot 57
  • 57

Frank Stella

Estimate
1,000,000 - 1,500,000 USD
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Description

  • Frank Stella
  • Jacques le fataliste
  • synthetic polymer paint on canvas
  • 135 x 135 in. 343 x 343 cm.
  • Painted in 1974.

Provenance

William Rubin, New York
M. Knoedler & Company, Inc., New York
Phillips de Pury, New York, May 15, 2003, lot 28
Acquired by the present owner from the above

 

Exhibited

New York, The Museum of Modern Art; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Paris, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, October 1987- August 1989, p. 51, illustrated in color

Catalogue Note

Jacques le Fataliste, from 1972 is part of the artist’s monumental Diderot series which is rooted in the Concentric Squares begun in the early 1960’s.  Both series share a systemic use of both color and value scales.  The colors are extracted and abstracted from the hues of the color wheel, and the gray tonal scale was made to correspond to it in number.  Stella notes, "The effect of doing it 'by the numbers', so to say, gave me a kind 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.  The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard" (as quoted in Exh.Cat., New York, The Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, 1987, p. 48).  With the Diderot series, Stella did not simply enlarge the widths of the bands to fill the new larger canvases: he increased the number of bands accentuating the compelling size of the paintings.  This technique also enabled Stella to more precisely subdivide hue and value.

Almost all of the works in the Diderot series are named after works written by the prominent French philosopher and encyclopedist Denis Diderot in the mid to late 1700's.  Diderot was a key figure in the Enlightenment.  In 1771, he contributed to Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master).  The work challenged the conventions of novels of the time in both structure and content and examined the philosophical ideas of free will. In the same spirit, Stella continuously challenged himself to add to the visual excitement of his canvases while still working within the bounds of the programmatic stripe series.  Jacques le Fataliste is an excellent example of the continuous innovation of the artist in his Diderot paintings.  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).