Pillar of abstract art, Frank Stella, in front of ‘Firuzabad’, one of his paintings.
Frank Stella was a giant of the contemporary art world until his death in May 2024, aged 87. Mainly associated with Minimalism and Abstraction, Stella’s love for exploring different styles and experimenting with new techniques changed the art world forever, and his influence will undoubtedly continue to be felt for many years to come.
He was a remarkably prolific artist who worked in a range of materials across sculpture, painting, and printmaking. Indeed, prints account for 81% of Stella’s work sold at auction, and they usually sell for between £1,000 and £5,000, though a significant number reach even higher prices.
Below is a list of Frank Stella’s six most expensive prints sold at auction. If you’d like to know more about how much a Frank Stella print might be worth, or how to sell it, please contact Mark Littler today.
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The Fountain
The Fountain measures an enormous 7 x 23 feet, and, despite being mural-sized, it is actually among the largest fine-art prints ever created. The gigantic print dates from 1992, and it’s an extraordinary combination of colours and techniques. The impressive homage to Stella’s printmaking process was sold for £233,039 by Christie’s in October 2019.
The Fountain began as a collage created from the rejected fragments of prints from Stella’s Moby Dick series, a series which reflected the artist’s increasingly common practice of bringing literature into his work. The title of the print comes from chapter 85 of Herman Melville’s canonical novel, Moby Dick, and it refers to the rainbowlike spray the enormous whale expels through its blowhole.
The Fountain sold by Christie’s in 2019
Double Gray Scramble
This print dates from 1973, yet the concentric, diminishing squares hark back to some of Stella’s previous pieces, such as Jasper’s Dilemma of the early 1960s. According to Stella, “the concentric square format is about as neutral and as simple as you can get. 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 – at least for me. It’s one of those givens, and it’s very hard for me not to paint it.”
There’s an element of Op Art in Double Gray Scramble and, as with Op Art, the superficial simplicity of the image belies its underlying complexities. The print is now among Stella’s most popular on the market, accounting for five out of ten of his most expensive prints sold at auction. This particular one was sold by Christie’s in November 2018 for £202,835, nearly four times its estimate.
Double Gray Scramble sold by Christie’s in 2019
River Of Ponds I-IV
These four lithographs in colours date from 1971, and they were sold by Christie’s in April 2023 for £128,748, more than double their estimated value. They come from Stella’s Newfoundland Series, which involved six prints (the other two being Port aux Basques and Bonne Bay), each of which is a reconfiguration of the curves and shapes found in the artist’s Protractor series from a few years before.
River of Ponds sold by Christie’s in 2023
Illustrations After El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya
Frank Stella was inspired to create this series of 12 prints after seeing a number of 1919 gouaches by Russian artist El Lissitzky which illustrated the lyrics of ‘Had Gadya’, a traditional Jewish Passover song. As with The Fountain, in this series, Stella combined a large number of different techniques to great effect in order to produce the vibrant, dynamic abstract prints in response to both the song (another indication of his abiding interest in poetry and literature) and El Lissitzky’s earlier gouaches. The series, full of bold colours and organic shapes, was sold by Sotheby’s in May 1989 for £120,340.
Part of the Illustrations After El Lissitzky’s Had Gadya series
Stapling Down And Cutting Up #2
The title of this offset lithograph refers to one of the techniques Stella used for creating collages that would later become prints, such as The Fountain. Stella is well-known for pushing the boundaries of printmaking after he first started exploring the medium in the mid-1960s. It was Kenneth Tyler, the master printmaker who worked with David Hockney, who first convinced Stella to try printmaking, and it didn’t take long before the artist was hooked.
Soon, Stella was coming up with new, innovative ideas that are still used in printing to this day. In fact, he is credited with inventing offset lithography, a technique which involves transferring the image to an intermediary surface before creating the final print, rather than printing directly onto the paper. The technique had an undeniable impact on printmaking because it meant the final print was the same way around as the original design, instead of being a mirror image.
Stapling Down And Cutting Up #2 sold by Phillip’s in 2018
Pergusa Three
Frank Stella’s Circuits series was made between 1982 and 1984. The series involved 16 prints of varying sizes, and it was inspired by Stella’s lifelong passion for car racing. The prints are named after different famous race tracks that the artist visited: Imola, Estoril, Talladega, and, of course, Pergusa.
The extraordinarily dynamic and colourful collection of prints was created using a variety of different techniques, including a specific type of relief printing that Stella pioneered. Prints from the Circuits series (especially the Pergusa prints) are highly sought-after at auction, with this particular print reaching £64,990 when it was sold by Sotheby’s in March 2022.
Pergusa Three sold by Sotheby’s in 2022
