Dewey Square

Frank Stella's "Dewey Square" (1962) is an oil on canvas from an earlier phase of Stella's career, before the protractor series. Dewey Square is a location in Boston, and the title follows Stella's practice of naming works after places. This painting belongs to Stella's "black paintings," the series of works from the late 1950s and early 1960s that first brought him to fame. The black paintings were exactly that: canvases painted with black enamel in regular, repeating stripes, the only variation being the shape of the canvas and the arrangement of the stripes that followed the canvas's contours. "Dewey Square" likely features a symmetrical, geometric pattern in black paint, the stripes creating a regular, rhythmic pattern. The oil on canvas technique is deliberately impersonal, the paint applied evenly and smoothly. These works were a radical departure from the expressive gesture of Abstract Expressionism, proposing instead a cool, detached, systematic approach to painting that aligned with the emerging Minimalist aesthetic.

Stella's black paintings were among the most controversial and influential works of the early 1960s, their radical simplicity and rejection of expression challenging the fundamental assumptions of what painting could be.

This black painting from Stella's breakthrough series reduces painting to its most elemental form: regular black stripes on a shaped canvas, a radical statement that redefined the possibilities of abstract art.