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Frank Stella , b. May 12, 1936
printed by Robert de la Rocha

Gezira

1967
13 3/8 in. x 8 in. (33.97 cm x 20.32 cm)

Medium and Support: color lithograph on Barcham Green etching paper

Credit Line: gift of the artist (PA 1954), Addison Art Drive

Accession Number: 1991.90.2

Commentary

Only four years after graduating from Phillips Academy in 1954, Frank Stella set his career into orbit by completing his first series of paintings, the Black Paintings. By contrasting areas of the canvas covered by brushstrokes in black paint with blank areas, Stella created a painterly equivalent of pinstripe fabric, in which references to the real world are made only through highly associative titles and are never present in the works. In 1962, his friend and Phillips Academy classmate Hollis Frampton wrote about his Black Paintings, “Frank Stella is a Constructivist. He makes paintings by combining identical, discrete units. Those units are not stripes, but brush strokes.” Master printer Kenneth Tyler approached Stella in 1967 with a proposition: to begin making prints of his paintings. Based on initial drawings made with Magic Marker, The Black Album was followed by additional portfolios of the artist’s paintings, and became the first project in a remarkably innovative four-decade collaboration.

Kelley Tialiou
Charles H. Sawyer Curatorial Assistant | Librarian | Archivist

Exhibition List

This object was included in the following exhibitions:

American Abstraction from the Addison Gallery of American Art American Federation of Arts , 2/27/1993 - 12/4/1994
Light/Dark, White/Black Addison Gallery of American Art , 1/17/2015 - 7/31/2015

Related Parent(s) Click a record to view

Black Series II
1991.90.1-8

Related Siblings(s) Click a record to view

Tuxedo Park
1991.90.1

Point of Pines
1991.90.3

Zambesi
1991.90.4

Jill
1991.90.5

Delphine and Hippolyte
1991.90.6

Gavotte
1991.90.7

Turkish Mambo
1991.90.8

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