Frank Stella (B. 1936)La prima spada e l'ultima scopa 1983 synthetic polymer paint on aluminium honeycomb panels and acrylic panel 379.7 by 346.1 by 86.4 cm. 149 1/2 by 136 1/4 by 34 in. This work was executed in 1983. Footnotes:ProvenancePrivate Collection, USSale: Phillips, New York, Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 14 May 2015, Lot 41Private Collection, TurkeyAcquired directly from the above by the present ownerThere is but a handful of artists whose careers capture, define, and redefine the art of an era – thought leaders and virtuosos whose work rewrites the terms of engagement. It could be said of Picasso's cubist leap, Le Corbusier's architecture, Pollock's drips on floor-strewn canvas, The Beatles Please Please Me. For Frank Stella, since his arrival in New York in 1958, his work has steered the course of contemporary art practice through sequential breakthroughs, with his greatest evolution emerging in 1983 after his residency at the American Academy in Rome. Presented here is one of Stella's first and most magnificent works of this period, La prima spada e l'ultima scopa from 1983. A monumental feat of sculpture and painting, the present work draws upon a plethora of references, sources, and historical allusions that culminate in a complex work of sheer brilliance. As part of Stella's Cones and Pillars series (1984-1987) – examples of which reside in the Tate Collection, London (Salta nel mio Sacco, 1984), the National Gallery of Art, Washington (La scienza della fiacca, 1984), and the Centre Pompidou, Paris (La vecchia dell'orto, 1986) – La prima spada e l'ultima scopa is one of the finest, museum-quality examples to come to market. It embodies Stella at his most confident and unhindered, weaving passages of expressive brushstrokes into a lattice of polygonal supports that conjures Romanesque architecture, Russian Constructivism, the swirling strokes of De Kooning, as well as Stella's own shaped canvases of the 1960s. Born in 1936, Stella's ascendancy to the New York avant-garde was swift and prodigious. After majoring in history at Princeton – where he befriended art critic Michael Fried – his practice emerged seemingly fully-formed, producing his pioneering Black Paintings throughout 1959. Such was the impact of his arrival and this debut sequence of works, made freehand in household paint, curator Dorothy Miller included the 23-year-old Stella's works in 16 Americans at MoMA, opening in December of 1959. It was a ground-breaking exhibition that flexed American art and its youthful talent as the pinnacle of global creative freedom and endeavour. Stella's inclusion alongside the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly, and Louise Nevelson, sealed the artist's place amongst this burgeoning generation who inherited the mantle from a diminishing group of Abstract Expressionists. Whilst Stella's earliest works were significant and impactful for their searing simplicity, devoid of colour and composition, his paintings remained tacitly in-step with the critical recourse of the time. Visual art had emerged from the Greenbergian school prizing the painting qua painting, believing that the nature of a work of art is bound in its constituent parts: paint and support. Stella took this to its limit with his very first step, which, in many people's eyes, signalled the end of Abstract Expressionism and the birth of American Minimalism. As Donald Judd remarked of Stella's influence on his own practice: 'the order is not rationalistic and underlying but is simply order, like that of continuity, one thing after another. A painting isn't an image. The shapes, the unity, the projection, order, and colour are specific, aggressive, and powerful' (Donald Judd, Donald Judd: Writings, New York: 2016, p.141).Marking a hugely critical step away from academic painting and out of the shadow of Minimalism, what Stella's work achieved in the 1980s is a grand synthesis of his experience, ambition, and ceaseless curiosity that culminates in the true maturation of Stella's ultimate style and method. In residence at the American Academy in Rome between 1982-1983, the artist used this opportunity to delve deep into the legacy of the Baroque period and the lives and careers of Caravaggio, Rubens, and Velázquez. Studying their use of light, colour and hue, picture planes and sequential, overlapping passages of a painting's composition, Stella suffused a maximalism and grandeur that can only be described as monumental in La prima spada e l'ultima scopa. Considering the influence of Caravaggio on his practice and what he considered to be a crisis in abstract painting, Stella would go on to deliver a series of lectures at Harvard on the 16th century Milanese painter in 1983-1984, before publishing both an eponymous book, Caravaggio, and Working Space, in 1986, taking aim at contemporary painting's need to develop a pictorial space as potent as Caravaggio's – allowing a painting more 'real' space to suggest extension and unrestricted motion. La prima spada e l'ultima scopa captures this newfound verve with consummate mastery. Through arching projections and intersecting facets, the present work is an operatic display of how a painting can stitch, not only illusionistic space together, but the real space of multiple, sculptural planes. Few painters have attempted such a break from the canon – fewer still have succeeded. Stella remains painting's greatest originator of the postmodern period. As his friend and prominent critic, Michael Fried, commented: 'the visual illusionism in Stella's new pictures goes beyond advanced sculpture in the direction of [...] opticality and illusiveness. [...] Because sculpture is literal it can, in the end, be known; whereas the shapes that constitute Stella's new paintings, and the new paintings as experienced wholes, cannot' (Michael Fried, Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews, Chicago: 1998, p.96). This unbounded creativity marks one of the most significant passages of Stella's career, and indeed of twentieth century art. One of the earliest works from his Cones and Pillars series (1984-1987) – often cited as a reference to Paul Cézanne's assertion that a painter should organise nature into cylinders, spheres, and cones – in La prima spada e l'ultima scopa, Stella investigated the potentialities of abstract painting still further through their descriptive function. In 1983, the artist was working on a series of prints entitled Illustrations after El Lissitzky's 'Had Gadya'. In Lissitzky's artistic implementation of the traditions of Jewish Passover, Stella recognised that he had 'attempted something few abstract painters have ever tried to do: address a narrative' (the artist in: Michael Auping, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, New York: 2015, p.32). Upon meeting Italo Calvino at one of his Harvard addresses in 1984, Stella found the Italian fables of Calvino the perfect narrative vehicle for his Cones and Pillars works, titling all of them post-production after the short stories in the Italian's 1956 collection. La prima spada e l'ultima scopa (here meaning 'the first sword and the last broom') tells the story of a wager between two merchants, who send their eldest son (the first sw... 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