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10 - 10. 10P W FRANK STELLA (1936-2024) Costa Mesa 1967 signed, t…
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Estimate €1,500,000 - €2,000,000
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Description
10. 10P W FRANK STELLA (1936-2024) Costa Mesa 1967 signed, titled and dated 1967 on reverse alkyd on canvas 160.5 x 320.5 x 8 cm. 63 3/16 x 126 3/16 x 3 1/8 in. Provenance Lawrence Rubin Collection, New York Gilbert G. Halbers Collection, Paris Collection Monsieur & Madame Claude Cluzel, Europe (acquired from them in 1978/79 via Pierre Weiller) Then by descent to the current owner Exhibition Paris, Galerie Daniel Templon, Frank Stella, Peintures 1970-1980, 19 September - 28 October 1981 Bibliography Magazine: Art Press, n°113, April 1987, p. 18, illustrated in black and white, in situ With their impenetrable and sumptuous supremacy, Frank Stella's works have something infinite about them. Their artistic asceticism, untamed by any competition, prevents any poetic wandering, with a hieratic quality that gives them a natural, sovereign authority in a credo that has become apologetic: "What you see is what you see", pronounced during an interview with Bruce Glaser in 1964. On that day, the artist sealed the advent of a new art. By scathingly tearing the gesture from all meaning, he dismissed the torments of the soul of the painting that had preceded his own, whether lyrical (Europe) or expressionist (USA), retaining from this eminently carnal art only the radicality of a gesture that suffers no repentance. It was in effervescent New York - the epicentre of artistic creation and distribution worldwide - that the young painter discovered the art of his time, dominated at the time by Jackson Pollock, Willem De Kooning, Franz Kline, etc., thanks to the teaching of William Seitz. In 1958, he pushed open the door of his future gallery owner Leo Castelli (who gave him his very first solo exhibition a year later) and, on discovering the flags of Jasper Johns, realised that the pictorial surface and the image represented in the same painting were merging. This new idiom was to become the lineament of his art, and the cornerstone of Minimalism. A prophet of conceptual art, this artist, with his creative emancipation laced with a Rimbaldian grace, synthesised the past centuries with unprecedented radicalism: no figure, no background. In Sixteen Americans, an exhibition organised by Dorothy Miller at MoMA in 1959-1960, Frank Stella unveiled one of his Black Paintings that would change contemporary art forever. He entrusted one of his friends, a still unknown sculptor who shared his studio, with the task of writing a few lines about him in the exhibition catalogue: "Art excludes the useless. Frank Stella found it necessary to paint stripes. There is nothing else in his painting", Carl André wrote that day, sketching out in a few powerful words the sediment of his art: tautology. A seminal event, it propelled the young artist to the forefront of the international scene, where he would reign supreme for forty years; MoMA gave him his first retrospective at the age of thirty-three, while William Rubin (one of the greatest art historians) asked him to become the exegete of his work. His work was shown in major retrospectives that redefined the art of his time, including Geometric Abstraction at the Whitney Museum in New York in 1962 and The Shaped Canvas at the Guggenheim in New York in 1964-1965. Based on modular repetition, with an ascetically rigorous structure punctuated by interstitial spaces that reveal the reserve of the canvas (unpainted lines), Costa Mesa, created in 1967, is the embodiment of the Concentric Squares and Mitered Mazes manifesto, in a sublime confrontation between achromy and polychromy. Each panel, divided along a diagonal axis, reveals a tonal demonstration of the dark rigour or spectral fluorescent explosion that alkyd allows, from a focal point. The title, meanwhile, evokes the place where the originator of the 'shaped canvas' worked to earn his living by repainting monuments, flats, etc. (Costa Mesa, which we are presenting, was created in California). A veritable icon in the Cluzel collection, acquired in 1978, this painting was kept out of sight for almost half a century. It is the purest expression of painting before which voices are silenced, for it is one of those masterpieces of hypnotic, sidereal beauty that command a penetrating silence. In contemporary art, this work is an absolute.
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About the sale Post-War & Contemporary Art including the Cluzel Collection
Auction location
Auction time 06/04/2026 at 4:00 PM
Pictures credits: Contact the Auction House
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