Plum Island (Luncheon on the Grass),

1958

After graduating from Princeton in the spring of 1958, Stella moved to New York, where he painted Plum Island (Luncheon in the Grass). The painting was inspired both by visiting Plum Island, off the coast of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and by the iconic painting Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) (1863, Musée d’Orsay, Paris) by Édouard Manet (1832–1883). With his painting, Manet announced himself as a new type of artist; instead of painting realistically, he emphasized painted elements such as color and form. So too did Stella privilege elements that were part of painting’s essential nature as a medium, such as color, form, and line, rather than aiming to depict the natural world faithfully. The fall following his graduation, Stella—already becoming a renowned postwar artist—returned to Princeton to hear the art critic and his mentor Clement Greenberg speak for the Gauss Seminars in Criticism, on “The Logistic of Modernist Painting,” in which he advocated for exploring characteristics unique to painting, such as the two-dimensional painted surface and its boundless formal possibilities.

James Christen Steward, Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director, Princeton University Art Museum