Potter's Young Bull in Stella's Dutch Savannah
As we saw above, Frank Cundall began his chapter on Paul Potter in the newly published book that Melville acquired in 1891 with a reproduction of Potter’s Young Bull (fig. 7 above) even though he felt that this widely celebrated “masterpiece” was “overrated.” Cundall conceded that the young bull was “magnificently drawn,” its scale was “all out of proportion to the object being represented” (124-25).
Nearly a century later, Frank Stella, in the Norton Poetry Lectures he published as Working Space in 1986, used Potter’s painting of The Young Bull as the central focus of the chapter he called “The Dutch Savannah.” Stella’s Dutch savannah is the flat landscape whose grazing cattle in the deeply receding background on the right give added force to the magnificent presence of the young bull who dominates the rising foreground on the left.
Stella started his argument by conceding that “the pictorial space of Potter’s Young Bull ends at the horizon line backed up against the priming. This painting is always paint-film deep; the illusion is never deeper than the glazes.” For Stella, “the power of the Young Bull is contained in his physical presence,” but we do not feel we could walk around him and see the other side of the body. Instead, Potter has created an abrupt spatial separation between the close cluster of large living shapes filling the rising foreground on the left and the much smaller shapes grazing on the deeply receding landscape. For Stella, the pictorial “edge” that so distinctly separates the rising diagonal space of the foreground from the flattened horizontal space of the background creates “the effect of unexpected spatial interval and displacement" that is too often lacking in modern abstraction. He therefore argues that it is Potter’s display of "magical intervals rather than his creation of acute, realistic presence which has allowed the Young Bull to stand so proudly for so long” (131-41).
Frank Stella began his Moby-Dick Series (one or more works for every chapter title of the novel) in 1985, one year before his Harvard Poetry lectures were published as Working Space. In 1987 he completed his second 3X version of The Spouter Inn, named for chapter 3 of Melville’s novel (fig. 10 below). This painted relief on cast aluminum matches Potter’s 1647 painting in its imposing size (78 ¼ x 93 ¼ x 46 ½ in). It also resembles that painting in juxtaposing a cluster of rounded shapes in the foreground on the left against the flattened background on the right side of the “magic interval” of the “edge.”
