Beschreibung:

Frank Stella La prima spada e l'ultima scopa 1983 synthetic polymer paint on aluminum honeycomb panels and acrylic panel 149 1/2 x 136 1/4 x 34 in. (379.7 x 346.1 x 86.4 cm)
Provenance Private Collection, United States Catalogue Essay When Frank Stella arrived in New York in the late 1950s, the gestural mark-making of Pollock and Kline reigned supreme. Much as he admired their work, the young artist sought to break with tradition; as he puts it, “you can’t be an abstract expressionist if you’re born 20 or 30 years too late. It’s over before you get there.” In the shadow cast by these luminaries, Stella began to develop his own aesthetic. Like the abstract expressionists, he had little interest in representation; according to his theorisations, a painting was “a flat surface with paint on it –nothing more.” Unlike his predecessors, however, he rid his work of noise and gesture; his early compositions were neat, his palettes terse, and his surfaces clean. Soon though, Stella moved away from cool minimalism. Retaining an interest in the painting as object, he increasingly began to work with sculpture, or as he put it “painting cut out and stood up somewhere.” From the 1970s, his work became more expansive both geometrically and emotionally. Much of his sculptural work, as the present lot, abounds with depth and color; space opens up in a way that feels at once celebratory and revelatory. At 78, Frank Stella is one of the most important artists of his generation; creating work that runs the gamut from the reserved to the frenetic, his influence is felt from Minimalism to Neo-Expressionism. In 1959, shortly after moving to New York, Stella’s work was included in a MoMA exhibition entitled “Sixteen Americans.” Exhibited alongside Robert Rauschenberg Ellsworth Kelly and his close friend Jasper Johns were Stella’s now-coveted Black Paintings. In this series, Stella did away with the tradition of preliminary sketches, letting the brush stroke create its own path over the structure of the canvas. These paintings, in which bands of black house paint are directly painted onto an unprimed canvas, were initially decried as dull. But history has proved the critics wrong; the paintings’ sleek lines and smooth surfaces expressed a cool detachment, anticipating a new wave of Minimalist experimentation. Stella’s major departure from his early work came in the mid-1960s with his Irregular Polygons series; consisting of a staggering 44 canvases, the geometrically aberrant pieces provided a platform for experimentation in fields of color and secured his 1970 retrospective at MoMA. Aged 33, Stella was the youngest artist to be honored by the institution in this way, a record which was overshadowed in 1987 when he became the first artist to be given a second retrospective at the museum in his lifetime. The works produced after Stella’s first retrospective again marked a departure in his practice: at this time, he began experimenting with printmaking and began moving beyond the minimalist style that marked his early works. As a result, the series that followed were more dynamic, and while they retained their non-representational nature, they also became more expressive. The present lot finds Stella at his most expansive. A profusion of shapes protrude beyond the confines of the canvas. Both spatially and conceptually, the painterly form is extended, brought into conversation with sculpture. The palette is equally extensive; patches of bright color interlock with childlike naivety, suffusing the piece with festivity. The painting exists in a beguiling hinterland between forms in which conceptual and visual vitality collide. For all its modernity, though, the genealogy of the piece traces back to the turn of the Seventeenth Century. While in residence at the American Academy in Rome in 1982, Stella became entranced with the legacy of Caravaggio and the Baroque. This preoccupation looms large over the piece. In 1983, the same year that the present lot was created, Stella gave a lecture at Harvard University entitled Working Space. Subsequently published as a book, Stella outlined his project for reconsidered spatiality in c