The Jasper Dilemma

The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the USA.

Enamel on canvas.

Black and white monochrome works by Frank Stella pretty soon gave way to his bright and colourful compositions. His paintings, as before, consisted exclusively of strips of almost the same width, which uniformly covered the entire surface of the canvas. The peculiarity of this work is in the fact that it is a binary image, on the one hand – colourful, and on the other – black and white. As a follower of Pop art painter Jasper Johns, Frank Stella addressed this work to him, alluding to the famous phrase spoken by Jones, “The more I work with colour, the more I start to see gray.” The game of bright colours and their complete absence captivated the artist in the early 1960s so much that he created a series of works based on such a contrast.