Original 1982 Frank Stella Shards Series 3 Piece Metal Installation Some Pieces Are Missing

3 Piece Metal Installation - 1982 Frank Stella Shards Series - H119.5" X L138" X D6"
Some Pieces are missing as is

In 1995, as art collectors do, LeRoy put this Stella piece in an auction. It did not sell. In the meantime, LeRoy and his wife had a messy divorce, he died in 2001, and his many warehouses full of art and other memorabilia were dispersed, sometimes on purpose, and sometimes by theft. It wasn’t until 2015 that anyone became aware that the auction house still had the Stella – or rather, a part of it. Somewhere over the course of the two decades that the piece had been lost, the metal attachments had vanished. According to the auction house, a famous art moving company had picked up the actual metal shards in 1997, but had lost all of its files during Hurricane Sandy.There was lots of finger pointing, and in the end of it, the estate simply had the three panels – the backdrop and heart of the Stella work – returned to them.

The piece has lost none of its vibrancy and beauty, and historical importance – and hearkens back to an earlier age of New York– to the carefree and exorbitant life in the Dakota of Warner LeRoy, one of Frank Stella’s biggest fans

Frank Stella, in full Frank Philip Stella, (born May 12, 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, U.S.), American painter who began as a leading figure in the Minimalist art movement and later became known for his irregularly shaped works and large-scale multimedia reliefs.

Stella studied painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, and history at Princeton University (B.A., 1958). He originally painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, but, upon moving to New York City in the late 1950s, he began work on a series of innovative paintings marked by an austere and monumental simplicity of design. The “black paintings,” which established his reputation, incorporated symmetrical series of thin white stripes that replicated the canvas shape when seen against their black backgrounds. Those works—e.g., The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II (1959)—were included in the landmark exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1959–60. He had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, also in New York City. In the early 1960s Stella painted a series of progressively more complex variations on the theme of the frame-determined design and used both metallic-coloured paints and irregularly shaped canvases to that purpose. Stella expanded his use of colour in the Protractor series (1967–71), an influential group of paintings marked by intersecting geometric and curvilinear shapes and plays of vivid and harmonious colours, some of which were fluorescent.

Stella’s next decade opened with a survey of his work at MoMA (1970). In the late 1970s Stella broke with the hard-edged style of his previous work and began to produce sensuously coloured mixed-media reliefs that featured arabesques, French curves, and other organic shapes. His two-dimensional works became increasingly three-dimensional during the late 1970s and early 1980s and began to incorporate architectural forms made from materials such as aluminum and fibreglass. In the mid-1980s he embarked on a major project that took its title from and was based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Between 1985 and 1997 Stella created some 260 pieces in the series, including prints, sculptures, and reliefs named after chapters in Melville’s novel. MoMA held another retrospective of his work in 1987.

Sold As Is

18%

Jeff Moran | (516) 287-1222 | Auction@usrelocators.com

Pickup Details

Private Residence

Moriches , NY

When to Pickup

Thursday, 9/16, 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm

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