“It’s just a powerful pictorial image. It’s so good that you can use it, abuse it, and even work against it to the point of ignoring it. It has a strength that’s almost indestructible. It’s one of those givens, and it’s very hard for me not to paint it.”
A mesmerizing crescendo of color, line, and painterly bravado, Honduras Lottery Co. announces the apex of Frank Stella’s artistic practice as applied to the very tenets of painting itself. Towering over seven feet in both height and length, Honduras Lottery Co. from 1962 is one from a limited suite of six Concentric Square masterworks of this scale that the artist painted that year, initiating a larger series that are today amongst the artist’s most iconic works. Testifying to the significance of this group, three of the paintings from this suite are already held in prestigious international museums, including the sister painting Louisiana Lottery Co. in the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C. Underscoring its prominence within the artist’s oeuvre, the present work was notably included in one of Frank Stella’s first significant solo exhibitions at the legendary Ferus Gallery, Los Angeles, and has been held by several of the most prominent private collects ors of California: first owned by Betty M. Asher, famed Los Angeles art patron and longt.mes affiliate of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the painting was subsequently owned by television titan Douglas S. Cramer. Following its acquisition in 2001 by California collects or Chara Schreyer, the painting was notably featured as the prominent cover work for the now iconic book Art House, which covers Schreyer’s singular collects ion and extraordinary residences. Executed at a critical juncture in the trajectory of postwar art, Honduras Lottery Co. triumphantly testifies to the conceptual rigor of Stella’s signature style, singularly encapsulating his interrogations of the elemental structures underlying the act of painting itself and enduring today a singular masterpiece of 20th Century American painting.
Frank Stella’s Monumental Concentric Squares of 1962
Within the compositional kaleidoscopic Honduras Lottery Co., pure color reigns supreme: and within the predetermined format of the Concentric Squares, the absolute literalism of Stella’s canvas reverberates with the precision and radicality of the artist’s radical take on the dominant formal vocabulary of Minimalism. Beaming outward from the bright core, a rainbow of scintillating hues proceeds in a cyclical development: electric yellows and crimsons progress into saturated greens, blues, and a deep, rich indigo. Then, as curator Michael Auping observes, “the pattern flips at one point; following the pattern from outer edge inward, for example, the color sequence suddenly reverses” (Michael Auping, “Phenomenology of Frank,” in: Exh. Cat., New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Frank Stella: A Retrospective, 2015-2016, p. 26). Stella’s arrangement of color and line directs the eye to the center of the composition and indeed creates a dueling sense of receding and projecting depth. At the same t.mes , coupled with the precise modulation of color and tonal values, the uniform schematic pattern collapses space together into a single flattened plane. Auping further describes: “The Concentric Squares are like visual traps that lure our eyes into a descending well of color motion. Some of the borderline lurid colors have the effect of flashing lights rather than soft color bands…Stella simultaneously gives us the impression of control and chaos.” (Ibid.)
Pulsating and vibrating with a dizzying optical hum, Honduras Lottery Co. radically blurs the distinction between figure and ground, defying the static nature of the canvas to announce the apotheosis of Stella’s lifelong aesthetic project. Amongst the earliest of the Concentric Squares, at the t.mes Stella embarked on this series, he was working and living as young artist in New York and using readily available house paints and housepainter's tools to create these compositions. “Continuing the use of Benjamin Moore paint, and continuing to paint tightly masked stripes in a concentric manner, Albers’ color interactions are amplified into high-intensity friction,” Michael Auping continues. “Just as Stella had previously asked himself how much of a painting could be taken away and still have it read as a painting, he now seemed to be asking how much color could be fitted into a pictorial structure” (Ibid., pp. 24-25). Abandoning the impassioned, improvisational immediacy of the Abstract Expressionism movement championed by his contemporaries, Stella acknowledges and embraces the flatness of the canvas. Just as the Abstract Expressionists were lauded by the likes of Clement Greenberg for their complete submission to the notion of art as simply paint on canvas, so too did Frank Stella literalize this concept – through a completely antithetical aesthetic strategy. As Honduras Lottery Co. exemplifies, he anarchically revels in a Minimalist level of standardization, claritys , and calculated precision.
Though the surface of the present work seems to deny denies any clear referents, the title of Honduras Lottery Co. does hold a wry and nuanced nod to a little-known historical narrative. The title of the painting, and its sister work, refer to the US government’s crackdown on the Louisiana State Lottery Company’s illegal operations out of Honduras in the mid-nineteenth century, when the privately-run Louisiana State Lottery Company was shut down for running not only the Louisiana lottery, but also maintaining a monopoly on lottery tickets country-wide. When the U.S. government outlawed the interstate distribution of lottery tickets and, the Louisiana State Lottery Company moved its headquarters to Honduras while continuing to unlawfully print and issue lottery tickets in the United States. The Department of Justice shut down their operations in 1907, effectively ending operations in both Louisiana and Honduras, but Honduras Lottery Co., in conjunction with its sister painting, Louisiana Lottery Co., remain as Stella’s oblique reference to the failed ruse. In playful homage, Stella uses the same palette of scarlet and vermilion, yellow and emerald, indigo and ultramarine across both works, but inverts their placement in the spectrum from one to the other – a winking nod to the fact that both corporations, though headquartered from different locations, were still fundamentally and functionally identical. This visual metaphor exemplifies Stella’s penchant for translating real-life historiography through the phenomenology of painting itself.
“It’s just a powerful pictorial image. It’s so good that you can use it, abuse it, and even work against it to the point of ignoring it. It has a strength that’s almost indestructible. It’s one of those givens, and it’s very hard for me not to paint it.”
Stella found the square format so ideal that he insisted that it was the simplest, most regular of all rectilinear formats, one that allowed for the maintenance of the same proportions throughout the field of the canvas. Within it, Stella discovered limitless opportunities to experiment with color and line in the direct simplicity of his pattern, and Honduras Lottery Co. witnesses his mastery in the meticulous orchestration of hues within such a set framework—an intricate dance of warm and cool tones flowing seamlessly into one another, oscillating between light and color from square to square. The monumental Concentric Square format in Honduras Lottery Co. was so seminal that, after spending much of the late 1960s and early 1970s working with shaped canvases and creating unexpected sculptural compositions, he would return to this series in the mid-1970s. Speaking to the import of these paintings, Stella stated, “The Concentric Squares created a pretty high, pretty tough pictorial standard. Their simple, rather humbling effect—almost a numbings power—became a sort of ‘control’ against which my increasing tendency in the seventies to be extravagant could be measured.” (The artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., New York, Museum of Modern Art, Frank Stella 1970-1987, 1987, p. 44).
Augmented by the operatic proportions of the canvas, the immediate visual bravado of Honduras Lottery Co. is most palpable in the tantalizing optical vortex that seems to radiate outward and then contract back inward throughout the squares, endowing the stark rationality of Stella’s Minimalist structure with a hypnotic, chromatic energy. Here, the staunch nihilism of his earlier Black Paintings has been saturated with a kaleidoscope joy, a decisive shift in the artist’s career that is wholly embodied by Honduras Lottery Co. Layer by layer, the interplay between geometric elements draws the gaze inward, inviting the viewer to unravel the prismatic complexities of the composition. In the process, Stella challenges perceptions of space and dimensionality: color and form converge in harmonious synergy, creating an optical whir that blurs the boundary between the painting's monumental presence and the very space it occupies. At a t.mes when the relevance of painting was hotly contested, Honduras Lottery Co. offers a heroic show of what painting can and should be, and far beyond any precedent. In Honduras Lottery Co., Stella nonchalantly negotiates the coexistence of hard intellect, cool Minimalism and explosive color. “Everybody was tired…” Stella recalls, “the field was sort of open. All you had to do was do it.” (the artist quoted in: Ibid., p. 7)
