Frank Stella

The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II debuted at The Museum of Modern Art in December 1959, one of four works from Stella’s Black Paintings series (1958–60) included in curator Dorothy C. Miller’s landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans. Miller invited the young artist to participate in the show after visiting his studio that summer. At the time, Stella had already produced the first version of The Marriage of Reason and Squalor; he made this second iteration expressly for the occasion, varying the composition slightly (as he did with two other paintings in the series). Working freehand, he applied enamel paint directly onto the canvas to create two seemingly identical sets of black stripes, each the width of the housepainters’ brush used to produce it, interspersed with lines of unpainted canvas. The picture’s two-dimensionality is emphasized by the symmetrical composition, a device Stella used in all his Black Paintings to subvert spatial illusion.

The Black Paintings reflect Stella’s desire to present the viewer with an immediate visual impact, devoid of references to anything outside the work itself. As his friend and fellow artist Carl Andre wrote of the series in the catalogue accompanying the 1959 MoMA show, “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessities of painting. . . . His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These paths lead only into painting.”