Marquis de Portago

Throughout the course of his professional career, Lawrence Rubin represented some of the most important and noteworthy artists of the 20th century, including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Motherwell, Richard Diebenkorn and Helen Frankenthaler. But of all the artists that he represented, none enjoyed as close and prolonged a friendship with him than Frank Stella. Rubin was a huge advocate and supporter of Stella’s career, giving him his first European solo show at Galerie Lawrence in Paris in 1961. In 1987 they jointly published a catalogue raisonné of Stella’s paintings from 1958 to 1965, and at one point they even owned a country house together.
The importance of Rubin to Stella’s lengthy career cannot be overstated, and these three works on paper, each coming from Rubin’s personal collection and dedicated emphatically ”for Larry,” are illustrative of this relationship. Marquis de Portago and The Marriage of Reason and Squalor relate to a respective painting of the same name, direct nods to the artist’s early and large-scale canvases that were championed by Rubin. Italian Curves from 1978-1979 shows Stella’s move from minimalism in the early 1960s to wall-mounted objects by the late 1970s: though two-dimensional in nature, its curling designs are visual continuations of the Exotic Bird series and antecedents of the large-scale metal artworks to come. As a trio, they not only represent some of Stella’s most important series of artworks, but also the longstanding and pivotal relationship that Rubin and Stella shared.