Monumental Painting Installed in Ludwig Mies van der Rohe´s Cullinan Hall
Frank Stella´s monumental Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III), 1970, has been acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, through the generosity of the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund. Currently on view in the Caroline Wiess Law building of the MFAH, this rarely seen masterpiece highlights a decisive moment in the artist´s ongoing project to test the limits of painting.
FRANK STELLA, American, born 1936, Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III), 1970, Alkyd on canvas, 600 x 120 x 4 inches, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Alice Pratt Brown, 2009.1171. © 2009 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
“I began my career in Houston in 1982 with the temporary murals commissioned for the Stella by Starlight gala,” states Dr. Peter C. Marzio, director of the MFAH. “Seeing Stella´s work cradled by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe´s architecture once again is truly a revelation as the shaped canvas complements the curved expanse of Mies´s walls brilliantly. This major gift allows the museum to restate our commitment to the artist, and further prompts us to reconsider the larger history of abstract art in America.”
“Stella created Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III) when he was the focus of a major survey exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art,” adds Alison de Lima Greene, curator of contemporary art and special projects. “The final statement of his Protractor series (1967-70), and among his largest canvases, it demonstrates Stella´s complete confidence in addressing the sources of modern art, from Islamic decoration to Henri Matisse to the innovations of Minimalism and Color Field painting. Its radiant ´fans´ dance across the surface, while the black borders and curved frame punch into our viewing space.”
The Protractor Series
Already celebrated for his reductive compositions and shaped canvases, Frank Stella launched into the Protractor series in 1967. Always ready to explore new sources outside of the Western canon, Stella limited the series to three patterns of decoration found in Islamic art: interlaces, rainbows, and fans. At the same time, he reduced these patterns to their essential, boldest forms, increasing the scale of his paintings so that they assume the physical proportions of architecture.
Damascus Gate (Stretch Variation III), 1970, measuring fifty feet across, is the vibrant culmination of this series. The title is taken from Jerusalem´s 16th-century Damascus Gate, although the composition more specifically echoes the polychrome rhythms of such edifices as Cordoba´s Great Mosque and Henri Matisse´s murals for The Barnes Foundation. As Stella explained to William S. Rubin for his 1970 Museum of Modern Art catalogue:
My main interest has been to make what is called decorative painting truly viable in unequivocal abstract terms. Decorative, that is, in a good sense, in the sense that it is applied to Matisse. . . . Maybe this is beyond abstract painting. I don´t know, but that´s where I´d like my painting to go. Anyway, it seems to me that at their best, my recent paintings are so strongly involved with pictorial problems and pictorial concerns that they´re not conventionally decorative in any way.
Writing in 1970, Philip Leider heralded Stella´s breakthrough compositions: “[The late Protractor paintings] have an expansiveness of decorative grandeur which bursts upon us like the interior of the Guggenheim Museum, triumphs of sheer confidence. In pictures like these, the identity we all share in Stella´s art as our art, the art of our time, is deepened, broadened, and made, of all things, joyous.”
About the Artist
Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston. He entered Princeton University in 1954, where he studied with Stephen Greene and William Seitz. After graduation, Stella made his home in New York and launched into the series of works that led to his Black Paintings, 1958-59. First introduced by the Museum of Modern Art´s Sixteen Americans in 1959, these radical compositions pointed to a new direction in American art, breaking decisively with the gestural abstraction of the New York School and heralding a form of “literalism” or “minimalism” that was to define the avant-garde of the 1960s. Stella was recognized yet again by MoMA in 1970 and 1987 with surveys organized by William S. Rubin, and he has also been the subject of major exhibitions organized by museums across Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Significant recent presentations of Stella´s work include Frank Stella 1958, a study of his early paintings, organized by the Harvard University Art Museums in 2006, and Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture, organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007. Stella is also prominently featured in The Robert and Jane Meyerhoff Collection now on view at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Frank Stella in Houston
Frank Stella has enjoyed a long history with the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The museum first acquired one of his shaped canvases in 1973 through the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. S. M. McAshan, Jr.; in 1982 the MFAH commissioned the artist to fill its Mies van der Rohe galleries with a series of temporary murals for the Stella by Starlight gala (the fifteen maquettes for these murals have been preserved in the museum´s collection); in 1987 Stella´s first out-of-doors relief, Decanter, was installed in the Lillie and Hugh Roy Cullen Sculpture Garden through the generosity of the Alice Pratt Brown Museum Fund; and in 2005 The Joseph and Sylvia Slifka Collection donated Stella´s Lunna Wola I, 1972. Outside the MFAH Stella is represented in The Menil Collection, and in 1997 he completed a major mural cycle for the Moores Opera House on the campus of the University of Houston.
MFAH Collections
Founded in 1900, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, is the largest art museum in America south of Chicago, west of Washington, D.C., and east of Los Angeles. The encyclopedic collection of the MFAH numbers nearly 60,000 works and embraces the art of antiquity to the present. Featured are the finest artistic examples of the major civilizations of Europe, Asia, North and South America, and Africa. Italian Renaissance paintings, French Impressionist works, photographs, American and European decorative arts, African and Pre-Columbian gold, American art, and European and American paintings and sculpture from post-1945 are particularly strong holdings. Recent additions to the collections include Rembrandt van Rijn´s Portrait of a Young Woman (1633), the Heiting Collection of Photography, a major suite of Gerhard Richter paintings, an array of important works by Jasper Johns, a rare, second-century Hellenistic bronze Head of Poseidon/Antigonos Doson, major canvases by 19th-century painters Gustave Courbet and J.M.W. Turner, distinguished work by the leading 20th- and 21st-century Latin American artists, and The Adolpho Leirner Collection of Brazilian Constructive Art.
MFAH Hours and Admission
Hours are Tuesday and Wednesday, 10 a.m.—5 p.m.; Thursday 10 a.m.—9 p.m.; Friday and Saturday, 10 a.m.—7 p.m.; and Sunday, 12:15—7 p.m. The museum is closed on Monday, except for holidays. Admission to this exhibition is included with general admission to the museum. General admission is $7 for adults and $3.50 for children 6-18, students, and senior adults (65+); admission is free for children 5 and under. Admission is free on Thursday, courtesy of Shell Oil Company Foundation. Admission is free on Saturday and Sunday for children 18 and under with a Houston Public Library Power Card or any other library card.
General Information:
For information, the public may call 713-639-7300, or visit www.mfah.org. For information in Spanish, call 713-639-7379. TDD/TYY for the hearing impaired, call 713-639-7390. For membership information, call 713-639-7550 or email [email protected]
