AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Stripes film stella12/25/2023 To arrive at the strict geometry of the diagonally focused Black Paintings such as Point of Pines, the artist would often start at the mid-point of the canvas and paint outwards, only discovering how many stripes each painting would contain as the work progressed. Although he often sketched out potential configurations on paper before he started painting, Stella was often unsure about exactly how many stripes there would be. Stella painted each of the stripes freehand, without the use of graphic lines or tape to guide him. Upon close inspection, the regimented stripes of Point of Pines display a high degree of pentimenti. In places the enamel appears flat and matte, elsewhere the drying pigment appears to have been applied in a more uneven fashion, reflecting a glossy, reflective surface. Each band is then painted over three or four times, creating a film thick enough to detach the band from the raw canvas. From a distance, these bands appear precise, carefully painted so that their diagonal paths converge at the apex of the painting each stripe is separated by a thin sliver of raw canvas-giving the overall effect of crisp pinstripe. Thus, Stella’s Black Paintings have become one of the most celebrated series of postwar paintings, and a number of examples from the series are now part of prestigious museum collections, including The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 1959 (Museum of Modern Art, New York) Arundel Castle, 1959 (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.) Club Onyx, 1959 (Baltimore Museum of Art) and Tuxedo Junction, 1960 (van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven).Īcross this sweeping canvas (named after a promontory in the Massachusetts Bay which used to house an amusement park), Stella lays down 35 bands of black enamel paint applied directly onto the surface of raw, unprimed canvas. Instead, these works were the embodiment of what would become one of the most famous quotes of postwar art history: his 1966 statement that “What you see is what you see” (F. Gone are the allegorical and psychological ramifications of painting. Unlike the generation of artists that preceded him, Stella was not interested in the emotional rawness of action painting, he was concerned purely with the act of applying pigment to the surface of the canvas. Point of Pines is one such painting a dramatic, large-scale work in which bands of black enamel are carefully and methodically painted directly onto raw canvas. While artists like Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline were primarily concerned with the supremacy of the gesture, Stella produced a series of striking black canvases in which the emblematic nature of the gesture seemed to have been eradicated altogether. Frank Stella’s Black Paintings, executed between 19, marked a significant turning point in the postwar artistic canon.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |