In 1961 Frank Stella completed a series of paintings which he named The Benjamin Moore Paintings after the brand of household paint he chose. He first made six large canvases, each with a distinct pattern and in one of the primary or secondary colours; red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. He then painted small versions of each pattern in each colour making a total of thirty-six paintings. Stella felt that the dominance of the design rendered the choice of colour arbitrary in the sense that it would not matter which of the six colours were applied to any particular pattern.

The present work is an example of the Delaware Crossing pattern. A process of simplification can be seen in the way in which the pattern of Delaware Crossing squares off the design of Die Fahne hoch (1959) which was the same design but on a rectangular canvas. Likewise he fills out the square implicit in Ouray (1960-61) which was a canvas shaped like a cross.

It is no coincidence that the Benjamin Moore Paintings follow the Aluminium and Copper series of 1960. From the most radically shaped canvases, Stella had turned to the most simple of forms, the square. Even though he was no longer exploring perimeters, he was concentrating on colour and detail. The Benjamin Moore alkyd paint was matt and static in its surface, and the general tightness of the execution of the series was intensified by Stella's narrowing of the unpainted spaces between bands. In the Aluminium and Copper series this had been approximately 1/8 of an inch; now it was reduced to about 1/16 of an inch. The result is that the patterns appear only subtly and from a distance almost disappear.