Frank Stella

Leo Castelli Gallery, New York (LC# 176)
Ed Cauduro, Portland (acquired from the above)
O.K. Harris Works of Art, New York
Acquired by the present owner from the above in 1976

Dayton, Dayton Art Institute, An International Selection 1964-1965, September - October 1964
New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, The Shaped Canvas, December 1964
Easton, Lafayette University, Group Exhibition, 1965
Portland, Portland Art Museum, Primacy of Color: Contemporary Paintings from the Collection of Edward Cauduro, 1965
Portland, Portland Art Museum, 60s to '72: American Art from the Cauduro Collection, 1972

Lawrence Rubin, Frank Stella Paintings 1958 to 1965, a Catalogue Raisonné, New York, 1986, cat. no. 220, p. 207, illustrated

This painting is in excellent condition for a work of this pigment type. The canvas is unframed. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at 212-606-7254 for a condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon.
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.
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Frank Stella's mature style is defined by a reductive vocabulary and by a pervasive spatial flatness. Following the seeming unpredictability and unbounded gestures featured in much Abstract Expressionist painting, Stella's regard for utter flatness appears preordained by the modernism espoused by the influential critic and art maven, Clement Greenberg.  In Valparaiso Green (sketch), one of the most reductive examples of the artist's 1963 series of Dartmouth Paintings, flatness is achieved through an elegant symmetry and the use of the monochrome; Stella's basic requirements for contemporary painting. Accordingly, Valparaiso Green (sketch) forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated and expertly achieved systematic facture. As one moves closer into the canvas however, the emphasis on exact linearity gives way to a luminous sheen. Separating the stripes are the pauses, the spaces of 'nothingness' and painterly avoidance, where the so-called flatness of the picture plane is both irredeemably challenged and beautifully disintegrated.

As one of Stella's earliest shaped canvases, Valparaiso Green (sketch) reflects the internal geometries of stripes running parallel to their enclosing edges. Like in Stella's next series of striped paintings, the Notched V Pictures, the entire surface appears to be in motion, each concentric ``V'' existing not simply as a vector in a field but comprising a field itself.  The equilibrium is achieved by a precise counterbalancing of these dynamic areas and forces. Stella has spoken of them as 'flying wedge' pictures, "a term that conjures an image of the V-shaped flying wing designs for the supersonic transports." Robert Rosenblum has referred to the "velocity of [Stella's] diagonal stripes as clean and breathless as a jet take-off." (Robert Rosenblum, "Frank Stella: Five Years of Variations on an 'Irreducible' Theme," On Modern American Art, New York, 1995, p. 164)

Lucy Lippard highlighted Stella's contributions, including the present painting, as the best work in the seminal 1964 exhibition, The Shaped Canvas at the Guggenheim Museum.  In spite of their radical nature it is not hard to find antecedents to Stella's shaped canvases such as Valparaiso Green (sketch). One such example are the buildings by Frank Lloyd Wright at the campus for Florida Southern College in Lakeland which Stella visited in March 1961. Amongst these, the Annie Merner Pfeiffer Chapel of 1938 is an immediate referent to Stella's work in Wright's use of  interlocking diamond-shaped and triangular modules. Rosenblum makes an art historial reference to a painting by James Abbot McNeill Whistler, Crepuscule in Flesh Color and Green: Valparaiso, (1866) which has been noted as the main catalyst for the Valparaiso Paintings. Specifically, "it was the trapezoidal and triangular patterns of the filmy sails in Whistler's painting of the Chilean harbor that triggered Stella's schematic translation of these compact geometric combinations." (Ibid., p. 175)

Visual dialogues with other contemporaries also exist.  Stella's formal correspondance and friendship with the Minimalist Carl Andre is particularly evident in their aesthetic concerns and common regard for pyramidal constructions and repeated units. Certainly, Andre's diagonal versus right-angled patterns of interlocking wooden strips offer a close parallel to Stella's Notched V Paintings. And like Stella's ground-breaking Black Paintings of 1958-1959, the ostensible simplicity of Valparaiso Green (sketch) maintains the purest essence of Minimalist art.