The Press Gang Sailor

Stella first studied art with Patrick Morgan at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, before attending Princeton University where he studied with William Seitz and Stephen Greene and became friends with the sculptor Carl Andre. Upon graduating with a degree in history, he moved to New York in 1958, where he soon befriended Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Stella emerged suddenly on the art scene in 1959, when his black-stripe abstractions where included in the "Sixteen Americans" exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. By the mid-1960s, Stella rejected the somberness of his early work for shaped canvases painted with industrial Day-Glo colors before moving to three-dimensional relief paintings and assemblages in the 1970s. "Press Gang Sailor" comes from Stella's "Wave" series of the mid-1980s. The works in the series, which question the boundary between painting and sculpture, bear titles alluding to Herman Melville's "Moby Dick." Originating in English naval practices, a "press gang" was a group of sailors hired to enlist individuals with sea experience into the navy. Visually, this mixed-media work draws upon both urban graffiti and Abstract Expressionism. For his relief pieces, Stella carefully worked out his seemingly chaotic compositions through a series of plywood maquettes before assembling the disparate materials. 3730 lbs/cubic ft.