Post-War & Contemporary Art

Frank Stella is part of a series by Andy Warhol titled Portraits of the Artist, all from 1967. The series was created on the occasion of the Tenth Anniversary exhibition, which opened February 4, 1967, at Leo Castelli Gallery in New York. Curated by David Whitney, the show included works by sixteen of the gallery artists. Along with laudatory comments from art world luminaries such as William C. Agee, then Associate Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as a poem by John Cage, the printed catalogue chronologically documents the gallery’s history with installation photographs of select exhibitions. The catalogue ends with a checklist of the artworks exhibited in the 1967 show, followed by images of each, arranged alphabetically. Warhol’s Portraits of the Artists series is last, which is an apt ending, as it summarizes Castelli’s history with individual portraits of twelve of the gallery artists, including himself, Lee Bontecou, John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Morris, Larry Poons, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Frank Stella, and Cy Twombly. To commemorate Leo Castellis’ tenth anniversary, in early 1967 Tanglewood Press produced a portfolio, Ten for Leo Castelli, which included a variant of Warhol’s portrait series. The portfolio consisted of 100 interchangeable two-inch polystyrene squares of different colors of which ten of the twelve Castelli portraits including Stella were reproduced ten times each.

The photographs Warhol used for his screens to create the portraits were provided by the gallery. The artist cropped the images and had them enlarged to different sizes. In some of the portraits, including the current example of Frank Stella, the heads are intact and framed by backgrounds of varying colors. The reproduced portrait of Stella is tilted slightly, which turns the black background in the original photograph into a diamond and adjusts his inclined head closer to upright. Warhol produced multiple versions of all the portraits and two of the portraits of Stella were installed in the 1967 show. They can be seen in an installation photograph that shows a total of fifteen portraits of different sizes hanging in a small entry foyer, although more may have been installed on other walls. The catalogue raisonné on Warhol lists four known examples of Frank Stella, including the present artwork. 

Portraits of the Artists can be considered a rare example of a group portrait by Warhol. Though portraits themselves are a significant part of the artist’s oeuvre, the only other example of a group portrait might be his double portrait of Michael and Roberts Abrams. The affiliation of the subjects in the Artist series, including that of Frank Stella, both on the wall at Castelli and as gallery artists, creates an association in the most traditional sense. They are individuals with a shared purpose, members of the same family so to speak: a group of artists who strove to break down boundaries of what art could be in the 20th century.