Beschreibung:

Frank Stella Double Scramble 1978 acrylic on canvas 68 x 136 in. (172.7 x 345.4 cm) Signed, titled and dated "DOUBLE SCRAMBLE: ASCENDING SPECTRUM DESCENDING ORANGE VALUES ASCENDING ORANGE VALUES DESCENDING SPECTRUM F. Stella '78" on the stretcher.
Provenance M. Knoedler & Co., New York Christie's, New York, Contemporary Art, May 5, 1992, lot 45 Acquired at the above sale by the present owner Exhibited Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art, Sign & Gesture, Contemporary Abstract Art from The Haskell Collection, March 21 - June 13, 1999, later traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens (June 23 - October 3, 1999), Tennessee, Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville (October 22, 1999 - February 13, 2000), Birmingham, Birmingham Museum of Art (March 5 - May 21, 2000) Dallas, The Meadows Museum of Art, Southern Methodist University, Bold Strokes Abstract Art from The Haskell Collection, September 16 - December 31, 2001 Jacksonville, Florida, Jacksonville Museum of Modern Art, Image + Energy Selections from The Haskell Collection, September 24, 2004 – January 9, 2005 Highlands, North Carolina, The Bascom, A Center for the Visual Arts, Frank Stella American Master, July 8 - September 2, 2011 Princeton, New Jersey, The Princeton University Art Museum, Rothko to Richter: Mark-Making in Abstract Painting from the Collection of Preston H. Haskell, May 2 - October 20, 2014, later traveled to Jacksonville, Florida, The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens (January 30 - April 22, 2015) Literature J.B. Holmes, The Haskell Collection, The Haskell Company, Jacksonville, Florida, 1997, no. 55 (illustrated) Sign & Gesture, Contemporary Abstract Art from The Haskell Collection, exh. cat., The Cummer Museum of Art and Gardens, 2000, pp. 50-51 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay “What you see is what you see, but the worthwhile qualities of painting are always going to be both visual and emotional, and it’s got to be a convincing emotional experience.” Frank Stella 1970 Frank Stella remains one of the most influential American artists of the post-war period. His work helped shape and define movements such as Minimalism, Color Field painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Heralded as a crucial innovator of Modernism, he is credited with both achieving the so-called last advancements in modernist painting and re-defining what the limits of modernist painting could be. The exuberant and methodical Double Scramble from the 1970s is an eloquent exemplar of his practice. Moving to New York in 1958, Stella was heavily influenced by the Abstract Expressionist movement prevalent at the time. Rejecting the expressive individuality of artists like Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning he was drawn to the group of Abstract Expressionists who favored expansive fields of solid color over gestural brushstrokes. Artists such as Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman through their use of flat color, paved the way for a new kind of abstraction to be explored. The prominent critic Clement Greenberg was the first to notice this division amongst the Abstract Expressionists and went on to coin the term Post-Painterly Abstraction to describe this new style of painting. Later works by Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland would bring this abstraction to new frontiers with an increased sense of clarity, symmetry and simplicity. Stella took this initiative even further, completely stripping his paintings of all psychological meaning and subjectivity and reducing the canvas to an orderly language of color based on repetition and form. Double Scramble is an illustrative work that showcases the degree to which Frank Stella was able to push modernist painting to its extremes while still maintaining a degree of openness. Measuring over five feet tall by eleven feet wide, the canvas dominates and overwhelms the viewer, calling to mind the mural-sized works of Rothko. Known for producing paintings in cycles, this work is an elaboration on his earlier Concentric Squares series. It is comprised of two large, symmetrical squares positioned side-by-side, each containing a set of twelve progressively smaller concentric squares whose color scheme is opposite one another. The method is precise and s