“Why is Frank Stella such a great artist? Because he fills in between those lines better than anybody else.”
—Robert Rauschenberg to Sidney Felsen, 1967
Frank Stella came to California in 1967 with his then-wife Barbara Rose, who were both invited to teach at U.C. Irvine – Barbara, art history and Frank to teach painting. At the time, signing a loyalty oath to the government was required. Frank refused.
As Sidney B. Felsen, co-founder and co-owner of Gemini recalls; “He was just sitting out in Irvine with nothing to do. He came in to visit Bob [Rauschenberg] somewhat regularly. And one day—as we had just purchased a whole collection of limestones that were fairly small, 17 by 23 inches, and very thin, from some print shop in England—Bob picked up one of those stones and handed it to Frank and said, 'Why don't you go back there in the corner and draw?' Frank was 29 at the time.”
Black Series closely relates to his large monochromatic Black Paintings (1958-1960), made using enamel paint and a standard housepainter’s brush. By then, Stella was famous for describing his work as, “What you see is what you see.” By focusing on purely formal concerns devoid of any references, he was reacting against the subjective artistic gestures and romanticism surrounding Abstract Expressionism.
Each lithograph in the series features a pattern of rectilinear stripes of uniform width printed in metallic black ink on buff -tinted paper. In the Black Paintings, the stripes extend to the edge of the canvas support; in the prints, Stella positioned the striped form in the lower left quadrant of the sheet. This format visually unifies the series, and subtly shifts focus from the symmetrical patterning to the asymmetrical relationship between the striped field and rectangular paper. The slight sheen of the metallic ink of the prints echoes the glossy finish of the oil-based enamel paint that Stella used in his paintings. The stripes in the prints are not opaque flats, as they would be in later series, but rather bands of dense scribbled line – or “noodling,” as Stella called it – drawn with a lithographic crayon.
—Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl
