In Stella Gran Cairo, Sturtevant reimagines Frank Stella’s tour de force with arresting exactitude, capturing the vivid concentric squares of Gran Cairo, 1962, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Executed just a couple years after her return from a decade-long hiatus from making art, Stella Gran Cairo exemplifies the conceptual nature of Sturtevant’s practice that baffled critics during the first half of her career.
A descendant of the 20th century art historical genealogy of appropriation art, which was initiated by the ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp—whose work asked viewers what art should be and how it should look—Sturtevant was closely associated with and used as source material works from her fellow mid-century appropriators, including Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and, of course, Stella. Tracking down and using the same paint he used in the early 1960s—even though it had been discontinued in the 1980s— Stella Gran Cairo exploits the supposed individual genius present in contemporaneous masterpieces, accentuating that despite the work’s meticulous likeness to Stella’s, “there’s no force there to make it exactly like” a Stella, she elucidated. “Quite the opposite—the characteristic force is lacking.”[i] |
Stella Gran Cairo impels us to consider: what is the true essence of a Stella work, the quality that makes a Stella a Stella?
|
|
![](https://phillips.vo.llnwd.net/v1/web_dev/lot-component/134361_Stella Gran Cairo_d859c5e7-c7fb-487c-9f9b-507d93b7d84f.png)
Frank Stella, Gran Cairo, 1962. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Artwork © 2020 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
|
Raising further inquiries into conventional notions of authenticity is her process; she chiefly worked from careful memory, aspiring not to produce exact replicas but rather to execute originals that challenged post-Dada understandings of the mythologized and mystical power of the artist’s hand. Though Sturtevant never asked artists for permission before recreating works, their admiration of her logic was implied considering that Warhol once lent her his silkscreens so that she could easily re-envision his Flowers.
|
“The brutal truth of the work is that it is not a copy. The push and shove of the work is the leap from image to concept. The dynamics of the work is that it throws out representation” – Sturtevant
|
Stella’s early Minimalist work, such as Gran Cairo, was critically acclaimed, and many publicly mourned when Stella moved on to explore different pictorial inquiries, a path which led him to his later “maximalist” works. Sturtevant’s re-interpretation of a Minimalist painting by the artist thus hints at the art world’s desire for him to repeat his former style in a manner reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico, who replicated his early paintings during the last years of his career. “It is as if she were asking, which is the ‘real’ Stella, the ‘true’ version? Put differently, why should Stella have been expected to reproduce his early work and not develop, for better or worse, his aesthetic?” art historian Patricia Lee asked. “Sturtevant addressed the demand on an artist to reify the style the public expects from him or her.”[ii]
From re-conceptualizing Stella’s chef-d’oeuvre to using Pop Art’s predilection for appropriation against itself in her versions of Warhol’s iconic imagery, Sturtevant is credited with launching a new era of art exploring queries of authorship and originality. Curator Peter Eleey expounded, “by faking faking, she showed that she was not a copyist, plagiarist, parodist, forger, or imitator, but was rather a kind of actionist, who adopted style as her medium in order to investigate aspects of art’s making, circulation, consumption, and canonization.”[ii] |
|
|
|
[i] Sturtevant, quoted in “Sturtevant, with Peter Halley,” Index Magazine, September/October 2005, p. 48.
[ii] Patricia Lee, Sturtevant: Warhol Marilyn, Cambridge, MA, 2016, p. 24.
[ii] Peter Eleey, Sturtevant: Double Trouble, exh. cat., The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2014, p. 50. |