Artist: Frank Stella
Title: Jonah Historically Regarded, from Moby Dick Domes (A. 210)
Sheet: 73.5 x 53 x 6 in. (186.69 x 134.62 x 15.24 cm.)
Frame: 77.75 x 57.25 x 12 Inches (197.49 x 145.42 x 30.48 cm)
Medium: Aquatint, etching, engraving, relief, screenprint and stencil with hand-coloring in acrylic on handmade, shaped TGL paper
Edition: of 21
Year: 1992
Notes: Hand Signed, Dated and Numbered by the Artist. Comes with Custom Built Tray Frame with Acrylic Case.
Since Frank Stella exhibited the dour simplicity of his Black Paintings at The Museum of Modern Art in 1959–1960, he has shaped and challenged trends in art, including Abstract Expressionism, Minimalist, and post-Minimalism. His complex use of structure, color, and shape has enlivened his work throughout his career, with sometimes subtle and great changes. In the 1980s and '90s in particular, Stella began breaking up the picture plane and exploring abstraction as both painter and sculptor. He said: "Abstraction in the 20th century is dependent on cubism, which is arranging planes in space, but the planes are arranged in a kind of stiff and geometric kind of way. Once the planes begin to bend and curve and deform then you get into what happens in Moby Dick — it's a way of opening things up for abstraction."
The present work, Jonah Historically Regarded, is one of the largest and most sculptural of Stella's prints from the ,Moby Dick series. It is from a small edition of 21, featuring myriad printing techniques, including etching, aquatint, engraving, screenprint, and stenciling, as well as additions of acrylic on a handmade paper produced by Stella's longtime collaborator and master printmaker Kenneth Tyler of Tyler Graphics. In 'opening' up this work, Stella also created a protruding dome at the center, not immediately recognizable if seen straight-on. At an oblique angle one can see the low-relief qualities of this work so closely indebted to his sculpture and wall reliefs.