Die Fahne Hoch! (Frank Stella)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Die Fahne Hoch! is an enamel on canvas painting by American artist Frank Stella, completed in 1959. It is held at the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York.
The painting is featured in The End of Art (20024) by Donald Kuspit.
Stella gave the work a provocative title, Die Fahne Hoch!, which means Raise the Flag!, in German, that is taken from the anthem of the Nazi Party, the "Horst-Wessel-Lied", and is one of three paintings in the series that make direct reference to Nazism. By applying a hotly emotive title to the image, Stella's ironic purpose was that of destabilizing the idea of meaning itself.
Die Fahne Hoch! is part of a series of paintings he created in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. Using commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush, he painted black stripes of the same width and evenly spaced on bare canvas, leaving the thin strips of canvas between them unpainted and exposed, along with his pencil-and-ruler drawn guidelines.
