Frank Stella, Les Indes Galantes V (Axsom 90), 1973

Frank Stella

Les Indes Galantes V (Axsom 90), 1973

Lithograph on J. Green mould-made paper

Pencil signed, dated and numbered AP 13/20 by Frank Stella on the front

16 × 22 inches

Unframed

This original Frank Stella lithograph, printed in London, is a coveted signed, dated and annotated Artist's Proof, numbered 13/20, aside from the regular edition of 100, from one of the artist's most celebrated series of graphic works in the 1970s.

The reasonne states, "The iconography of "Les Indes Galantes" refers to an opera-ballet composed by the 17th century French composter and music theorist Jean-Philippe Rameau. The five acts of Rameau's "Les Indes Galantes" are transposed into the five lithographs of Stella's series.

The series revisits the compositions of Stella's paintings "Mitered Mazes" and "Concentric Squares" created between 1962 and 1963. The catalogue raisonne (Axsom) states, "In the Concentric Squares and Mitered Mazes paintings, Stella introduced multiple colors for the first time after having completed four series of monochromatic stripe paintings. Stella now wished to order color and value in systematic progressions based on the color wheel and the gray scale. Abrupt juxtapositions of color, however, proved spatially unwieldy, and he discovered that he could not control color as readily as he had design (a perennial issue in art academies since the Italian Renaissance debates of "Venetian color" vs. "Florentine Line").

Like many of Stella's lithographs, the artist used a lithographic crayon to create the illusion that the works have been hand-sketched. This work exemplifies this technique as it contains both bright primary colors and several shades of gray. ("Les Indes Galantes" uses only the primary and secondary colors and five shades of gray. ) Pigment rich inks were developed for the series to replace the thinner, standard inks used in commercial lithography.

Published by Petersburg Press Ltd., London, printed by Hammond and Kell Lithographers, London

About Frank Stella:
Frank Stella (b. 1936; Malden, MA) has produced an extraordinary body of work over the past six decades. Since his first solo gallery exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery in 1960, Stella has exhibited widely throughout the United States and abroad. Early in his career, his work was included in a number of significant exhibitions that defined the art in the postwar era, including Sixteen Americans (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1959), Geometric Abstraction (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1962) The Shaped Canvas (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1964-65), Systemic Painting (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1966), Documenta 4 (1968), and Structure of Color (Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1971). Stella’s recent work uses digital modeling to explore how subtle changes in scale, texture, color and material can affect our perception and experience of an object.

Courtesy of Marianne Boesky Gallery