拍品 128
  • 128

FRANK STELLA | Sinjerli III

估價
2,000,000 - 3,000,000 USD
Log in to view results
招標截止

描述

  • Frank Stella
  • Sinjerli III
  • acrylic and fluorescent paint on canvas
  • 120 by 120 in. 304.8 by 304.8 cm.
  • Executed in 1967.

來源

Brown University, The Department of Art, Providence (gift of the artist in 1967)
Christie's, New York, 12 November 1980, Lot 61
Private Collection, California
Sotheby's, New York, 8 November 1989, Lot 29
Private Collection, California (acquired from the above sale)
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2010

展覽

New York, Museum of Modern Art; London, Hayward Gallery; Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum; Pasadena Art Museum; Toronto, Art Gallery of Ontario, Frank Stella: A Retrospective Exhibition, March 1970 - May 1971, cat. no. 33, p. 147, illustrated
Providence, Rhode Island School of Design, Museum of Art, Extended Loan, December 1971 - April 1972
Providence, Brown University, Bell Gallery, List Art Center, Art Department Collects, April - May 1972, no. 12 
New York, Paul Kasmin Gallery, Frank Stella: Shape as Form, September - October 2015

出版

Alfred Pacquement, Frank Stella, Paris 1988, pp. 70 and 184, illustrated

Condition

This work is in very good condition overall. Please contact the Contemporary Art Department at +1 212 606 7254 for a professional condition report prepared by Terrence Mahon. Framed.
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.

拍品資料及來源

"My main interest has been to make what is called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms...at their best, my recent paintings are so strongly involved with pictorial problems and pictorial concerns that they're not conventionally decorative in any way."
Frank Stella Vibrant and refined, Frank Stella’s Sinjerli III utilizes innovative organizational systems to unify form and color, making abstraction universally legible. Executed in 1967, the present work belongs to Stella’s Protractor series, which he began that year and which would dominate his artistic production until 1970. The series was inspired by a trip to Iran, and the circular urban plans of the ancient cities he visited. Each work in the series is titled after one of these ancient cities, combining the implied exoticism of semi-mythic ancient capitals with the quotidian protractor, creating a form that is at once familiar and new.

In Sinjerli III, the shape of the canvas dictates the composition. Each work in the Protractor series is classified based on the combination of arcs and line segments that make up the shape of its canvas. Sinjerli III is one of the earliest works in the series and captures Stella’s negotiation of the linear and curvilinear shaped canvas in his body of work. Within the series, there are three types denoted by the numerals which succeed the title of the work, with III indicating that the colors in the work should be arrayed in a “fan.” In the present work, this manifests in a system of framing units, each roughly inhabiting a quadrant of the surface. The quadrants are home to discrete spectra, each expanding out in linear rays from an implied vanishing point in the center of the composition.

Just as the shape of the canvas is dictated by its place in a regimented series, the colors that occupy each quadrant in the work also imply a logic or system in their placement and juxtaposition. Each color is applied with a technical flatness, erasing evidence of the hand, and in the words of Stella, keeping “the paint as good as it was in the can” (Frank Stella in Sidney Guberman, Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography, New York 1995, p. 62). Acting as a bridge between the earlier Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s and the Minimalists of the 1960s, Stella uses color contrasts as a proxy for gesture, employing unexpected combinations as conduits for his painterly energy and point of view. In the present work, the freneticism of a fluorescent yellow ray is subdued by the haziness of a pastel blush, and an effervescent red is cooled by successive bands of pinks and grays, creating a sense of force and movement that ebbs and flows throughout the canvas.

Despite the rubrics which dictate the composition of Sinjerli III, the work defies the standard limits of abstraction, forming an arsenal of visual idioms that are widely accessible. Stella takes the geometry of Malevich and standardizes it, making it deeply comprehensible. Articulating his desire for the process by which his paintings should be understood, Stella stated that his works should be “direct—right to your eye, something that you didn’t have to look around—you got the whole thing right away” (ibid, p. 38). To achieve this aim, in Sinjerli III Stella engages with notions of the decorative and integrated those motifs into the discourse surrounding abstraction. He emphasizes what at first glance could appear as decorative could also be “strongly involved with pictorial problems and pictorial concerns that they’re not conventionally decorative in any way” (Frank Stella as quoted in Exh. Cat., Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella, New York 1970, p. 149). Stella succeeded at this goal, and his series of Protractor paintings became as well-known and commercially sought after as any of Warhol’s paintings of Marilyn Monroe or Coca-Cola bottles. The Protractors were so ubiquitous in various printed matter and printed reproductions that master Conceptual painter John Baldessari used the likeness of one of Stella’s Protractor paintings for his own searingly intelligent and witty silkscreen version, adding the text “A 1968 PAINTING.” Baldessari’s appropriated painting is iconic of his own perennial questioning and radical re-evaluation of accepted notions of authorship, originality and aesthetic judgment, nearly mocking the success of Stella’s Protractors altogether. Indeed, of the Protractors Baldessari has said “[They] were…the essence of the clean, well-made, and broadly understood abstract painting. It was the perfect example of popular abstraction” (John Baldessari in Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, New York 2015, p. 28).