Untitled (Concentric Squares)

成交价美元 6,100,000

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美元 6,000,000 – 美元 8,000,000

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FRANK STELLA (1936-2024)

Untitled (Concentric Squares)

成交价美元 6,100,000

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FRANK STELLA (1936-2024)
Untitled (Concentric Squares)
signed and dated 'F. Stella '74' (on the overlap)
alkyd on canvas
80 ½ x 80 ½ in. (204.5 x 204.5 cm.)
Painted in 1974.

Knoedler Contemporary Art, New York
The Corporate Collection of USX, Pittsburgh
Their sale; Christie's, New York, 7 May 1990, lot 56
Private collection, New York
Anon. sale; Christie's, London, 9 December 1998, lot 771
Essl Collection, Vienna
Dominique Lévy Gallery, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Vienna, Kunst der Gegenwart, Essl Museum and Moderna Galerija Ljubljana, [Un]gemalt, July-October 2002, p. 165 (illustrated).
Vienna, Kunst de Gegenwart, Essl Museum, Die Sammlung, June 2008-January 2009.
Eugene, University of Oregon, Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Masterworks on Loan, April-July 2017.

“The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured.” Frank Stella

A riveting exploration of pure color, technical virtuosity and value relationships, Frank Stella’s Concentric Squares affirms the artist’s singular progression of American painting. By working with everyday materials such as commercial house paint and emphasizing the width and shape of the brush itself, he plotted a fruitful trajectory out of Abstract Expressionism and into the object-centric ideals of Minimalism. Formally in the prestigious Essl Collection in Austria, Untitled (Concentric Squares) stands as a testament to the artist’s unwavering commitment to self-contained series and painting methods which allowed him to innovate and grow within his own systematic structures. The width of his painted stripes coincides with the width of the brush which in turn necessitates the very size and shape of the overall canvas. Artist Carl Andre, speaking about Stella’s early work, noted, "Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. Symbols are counters passed among people. Frank Stella's painting is not symbolic. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting" (C. Andre in Sixteen Americans, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1959). Stella's paintings are wholly autonomous creations that draw the viewer toward them with no assistance from illusion or representation and exist as contained objects in their own right.

Set within a perfectly square canvas, Untitled (Concentric Squares) employs the same programmatic painting techniques that first catapulted Stella into the artistic consciousness. Using a standard-size flat paintbrush, the artist began painting in the middle and extended outward toward the edges. Beginning with a single dark square, he then began to create concentric squares of colors that ran through the full spectrum from red, orange, and yellow to green, blue, and purple. Rather than follow the tonal shift of a rainbow, Stella instead employs his own compositional logic that creates a bright central square that darkens toward the center and then dims again as it travels to the edges. Robert Rosenblum, talking about Stella’s compositions, noted that “these rectilinear relationships never produce discrete, self-sufficient shapes, but radiate beyond the canvas edges. Stella’s rectangles, whether expanding concentrically or segmented by the perimeter, imply infinite extendibility, the taut fragments of a potentially larger whole” (R.Rosenblum, Frank Stella, Baltimore, 1971, p. 17). Typical of Stella’s striped paintings, this example uses slim bands of raw canvas to separate each painted area. Drawn in pencil during his preparatory work, each discrete line creates a divide between the colors as they radiate outward.

When Stella graduated from Princeton in 1958, he firmly believed he had no interest in representational painting. Inspired by the revolutionary ideas of the “action painters” of New York, he worked on gestural abstractions that paid homage to these groundbreaking canvases. “I was very taken with Abstract Expressionism, largely because of the obvious physical elements, particularly the size of the paintings and the wholeness of the gesture. I had always liked house painting anyway, and the idea that they were using larger brushes… seemed to be a nice way of working…” (F. Stella in Frank Stella 1970-1987, exh. cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1987, p. 9). However, upon seeing Jasper Johns’s first solo exhibition in 1958, he was enthralled with the way Johns had borrowed the visual vocabulary, the visible brushstrokes, and the painterly qualities of the Abstract Expressionists and used them to create flags and targets with their own self-sufficient meaning. Realizing that works like Three Flags (1958) were quite literally flags and paintings at the same time helped the young painter to extract himself from any illusionistic trajectory and focus wholly on forthright, straightforward painting. From there, he began experimenting with systematic modes of creation in order to make works that spoke to their own existence and left little room for poetic interpretation. The Black Paintings, which were first shown in the seminal 16 Americans (1959-60) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, embraced the grandeur of Stella’s Abstract Expressionist forbearers while simultaneously setting the stage for a more minimal and direct understanding of the painting as object.

In the mid-1960s, Stella began work on a number of discrete series that investigated realms beyond the monochromatic canvases he had espoused in the previous decade. The Concentric Squares took the same straightforward tact as his past endeavors in an effort to highlight the physical surface and the simple path of the paintbrush, but Stella began introducing multiple arbitrary colors into his work to see what would happen. As the 1970s began, his canvases contorted and expanded away from traditional rectilinear formations, and these colors became increasingly important in the conversation between the various base elements of his artform. Untitled (Concentric Squares) created a touchstone for the artist that connected him back to his basic working ideals. “The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbing power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured” (Ibid., p. 44). As his working schema expanded with the years, Stella was careful to remain grounded in the strict rules he had set for himself. By doing so, he realized a body of work that is as conceptually rigorous as it is compositionally rich.

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Untitled (Concentric Squares)

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