Frank Stella’s four black enamel painted canvases of simple, deliberately arranged lines unveiled in December 1959 at Dorothy Miller’s 16 Americans exhibition turned the page on the excesses of the Abstract Expressionists and would shift the course of art history. Yet Stella would like to think his greatest impact is his compulsion to go for broke. For six decades and counting, he did just that. But place one of his exuberant, Baroque-inspired wall dependent sculptures from the 1980s or ‘90s next to a tautly painted canvas of that early time and it can be a vexing experience. Yet the trajectory of Frank Stella’s career is not so surprising when one considers his consistent refrain about reimagining materials in an interplay with surface values. When he found the confines of a rectangular canvas restrictive, he built frameworks to support irregular shapes then rebelled by building multi-tiered structures and painting them.

So perhaps the riotous exuberance of The Musket is not so far removed from those extraordinarily reductive paintings of that earlier time. Constructed and painted in 1990 and modeled on a computer, it is a construct of cut, trimmed, bent, and torqued honeycomb aluminum incised and painted in a wide range of fluorescent, metallic and acid colors that explode into low and medium relief.  Cubism and its tenets dominated twentieth-century art, but here Stella seems to have reached in a bag of confetti and tossed handfuls of it in the air in a sweeping gesture, celebrating freedom from that discipline. Its title is borrowed from chapter 123, one of two climactic scenes in Moby Dick that underscore Melville’s profound and intellectual commentary on human nature. The scene provides the pivotal moment when Starbuck realizes it may be his last chance to make the ultimate decision: save the ship and the crew’s lives by killing his mad captain or allow Ahab’s insanity to bring them to a watery death. The Pequod and its crew have passed the disastrous typhoon and have found smooth sailing and although the rest of the crew celebrate their good fortune despite the dark omens, as he enters Ahab’s cabin, in front of him is a rack of muskets, one of which had been pointed at him earlier. Yet he stands frozen in indecision. What will he do?