Frank Stella - Moss New York Tuesday, October 16, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    The Helman Collection, New York
    Private Collection, Los Angeles
    Edelman Arts, New York
    Private Collection, New York

  • Exhibited

    ‘Masterworks - Donald Judd, Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella’, Joseph Helman Gallery, New York, October - November, 1996

  • Literature

    Robert Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes, Ann Arbor, 2000, illustrated pp. 131, 144

  • Catalogue Essay

    In 1970, at the age of 33, Frank Stella was the youngest person to have a retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Only 17 years later he was granted the rare privilege of a second MoMA retrospective, his 1970-1987 body of work still largely interpreted in the vocabulary of abstract formalism, though expanded to include shapes such as French curves, flexicurves, cones, and pillars.

    Having read Moby-Dick in his youth, and viewing the 1956 film with Gregory Peck playing Captain Ahab, it was as an adult that Stella rediscovered the story, during visits to the Coney Island aquarium with his sons. ‘The first thing we saw every time we went into the aquarium were the Beluga whales in the tank just as you came right in the door. They were just sort of looming over you, as it were. I just kept seeing them for about two years, and then one day the wave forms and the whales started to come together as an idea.’

    When Frank Stella began the ‘Moby-Dick’ series he was predominantly an abstract painter and printmaker, but by 1997, when he had completed 266 unique artworks dedicated to the 138 chapters of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, he was a sculptor, creating large scale works wherein ‘abstract and figurative coexist with material and symbolic.’

    By linking his abstract forms with the whale and wave figures and specific chapters of Melville’s novel, Stella expanded interpretations for his work. The present lot, titled ‘Brit (Q6)’ is dedicated to chapter 58 of Melville’s novel, ‘Brit’, named for 'the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds.'

    The use of honeycomb aluminum might call to mind the whales’ baleen and the clouds of poured metal through the honeycomb might be the brit. Robert Wallace suggests that the ends of the sheet metal in ‘Brit (Q6)’ should be considered deliberately cut with Ms or Ws as ‘Stella’s abstract language is expansive enough to embrace shapes of letters and even punctuation marks.’ By introducing the figurative and symbolic to his work, Stella has allowed the viewer the opportunity to see a variety of things, layers of meaning in each of his pieces. No longer ‘what you see is what you see’ as he so famously said of his then-radical abstractions of the 1960s.

    All quotes from Robert Wallace, Frank Stella’s Moby-Dick: Words and Shapes, Ann Arbor, 2000

  • Artist Biography

    Frank Stella

    American • 1936 - N/A

    One of the most important living artists, Frank Stella is recognized as the most significant painter that transitioned from Abstract Expressionism to Minimalism. He believes that the painting should be the central object of interest rather than represenative of some subject outside of the work. Stella experimented with relief and created sculptural pieces with prominent properties of collage included. Rejecting the normalities of Minimalism, the artist transformed his style in a way that inspired those who had lost hope for the practice. Stella lives in Malden, Massachusetts and is based in New York and Rock Tavern, New York.

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67

Brit (Q-6), from the Moby-Dick series

1990
Acrylic, aluminum alloy, steel.
89 x 116 x 110 1/2 in. (226.1 x 294.6 x 280.7 cm)

Estimate
$300,000 - 400,000 

Sold for $338,500

Moss

16 October 2012
New York