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Among the most inventive contemporary artists, Frank Stella began in 1986 an extended series of works inspired by the classic novel Moby Dick (1851) by Pittsfield, Massachusetts, resident Herman Melville. The epic scale and drama of Stella’s sculpture befits his literary inspiration, which famously tells the story of the sailor Ishmael’s adventures with Captain Ahab to track and subdue the great white whale. The title of the sculpture refers to chapter 57, in which Ishmael ponders whales he has seen in New Bedford, in London, throughout the Pacific, and even in the sky. The incessant undulation of Stella’s work suggests the tumultuous sea, while its brightly patterned, irregular shapes evoke multiple, even unearthly realms. Emphatically sculptural and painterly, Of Whales in Paint crosses media and, thus, flies in the face of artistic “purity,” which had been a priority for many midcentury modern artists.
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