Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He lived and worked in New York City for much of his career before moving his studio to Rock Tavern, New York. Stella's work catalyzed the minimalist movement in the late 1950s. He moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he created works which emphasized the picture-as-object. These were influenced by the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.
He developed a reductionist approach to his art, saying he wanted to demonstrate that for him, every painting is "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more", and disavowed conceptions of art as a means of expressing emotion. He won notice in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art. Stella was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.
Biography
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their three children. His grandparents on both sides had immigrated to the United States at the turn of the 20th century from Sicily. His father, Frank Sr., was a gynecologist, and his mother Constance (née Santonelli) was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting. His father painted houses to pay his way through medical school, with young Stella as his helper. Many years later he told an interviewer, "My father would make me sand the floor; we had to do the sanding and scraping before you could hold the brush and then paint on the wall. So it was that kind of apprenticeship and familiarity."
Stella went to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, In his sophomore year, the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a teacher at the school, began teaching Stella how to paint. At this time Stella was particularly affected by the work of the artist Josef Albers, a Bauhaus color theorist, and Hans Hofmann, an influential proto-Abstract Expressionist. After entering Princeton University where he majored in history, played lacrosse and wrestled, As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his upstate studio at Rock Tavern, New York, in the Hudson River Valley.
He created a series of paintings in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. At age 22 in late 1958, he used commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush to paint 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. These paintings, his response to the Abstract Expressionist movement that grew in the years following World War II, were devoid of color and meant to lack any visual stimulation.
Die Fahne Hoch! (1959), one of the "Black Paintings" series, takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!" or "Raise the Flag!" in English) from the first line of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied", the anthem of the Nazi Party. According to Stella himself, the painting has similar proportions as flags used by that organization.
Stella's work was a catalyst for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials he used in his paintings, disavowing any conception of art as a means of expressing emotion. The same year, several of his paintings were included in the Three Young Americans showing at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. he summarized his concerns as a painter with the words, "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.... What you see is what you see." The much-quoted tautology, "What you see is what you see",
From 1960, his works used shaped canvases, developing in 1966 into more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series (67). In 1961, Stella followed Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, to Pamplona, Spain, where she had gone on a Fulbright fellowship; they married in London that November. Upon their return to New York, Rose and Stella moved into an apartment near Union Square and had two children. After they split up in 1969, Rose began to reconsider her relationship with minimalism, and became a champion of less well-recognized painters.
Late 1960s and early 1970s
thumb|left|upright=1.3|Frank Stella Harran II, 1967
In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The same year, his began his Protractor Series (1967–71) of paintings, named after the common measuring instrument, a half circle protractor. These feature arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular-plan cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. He was especially intrigued by the arches and decorative patterns he observed in the architecture and art of Iran. His painting, Protractor Variation I (1969), now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity of his output after the late 1960s. This work typified his experimentation with shaped canvases, producing innovative paintings in which the imagery was set by their contours.
In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one. Stella was among those artists invited to participate in the problem-plagued 35th Art Biennale in Venice (1970) who joined a boycott by artists opposed to the US wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and withdrew their works from display at the American Pavilion.
In the following decade, as he began to adopt more unusual color schemes and shapes, Stella brought to his artistic productions the element of relief, which he called "maximalist" painting because it had sculptural attributes.
Stella abandoned rational structures in the mid-1970s and began to explore new, individualistic paths. He replaced solid planes with squiggles, lattices, and swirls of color. Composite features began to project from his canvases in all directions, while his wall-mounted paintings evolved into outlandish sculptures. He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas."
He married pediatrician Harriet McGurk in 1978. The mural for the dome was based on computer-generated imagery. In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia at the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. A monumental sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark in 2012. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York, studio.
The Scarlatti K series, begun in 2006, consists of eight works by Stella from his Scarlatti Kirkpatrick polychrome sculpture series, for which he used a 3-D printer to create the metal and resin segments. The series title refers to the music of the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known for his short but exuberant Baroque period harpsichord sonatas (he wrote more than 500 of them), and to Ralph Kirkpatrick, the American musicologist and harpsichordist, who brought Scarlatti's work to the attention of the listening public, and in 1953 produced the authoritative scholarly catalogue of the sonatas. Stella was inspired by the sonatas, and his series works, like the sonatas, are given "K" numbers, but they allude to Scarlatti's music abstractly with visual rhythm and movement, according to Stella, rather than literal correlation. Stella continued producing new works in the series into 2012. These were shown at the Freedman Art Gallery that year, and commenting about his work in the series, Stella said, "If you follow the edges of the lines, there's a sense of movement, and when they move well and the color follows, they become colorful, and that's what happens in the Scarlatti—it builds up and it moves...". Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, showed Stella's work in an exhibition featuring computer-enabled pieces, Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital (2013-14). The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits. It was created to replace the large (each ten feet wide by ten feet tall) diptych of his paintings, Laestrygonia I and Telepilus Laestrygonia II, that had been displayed in the lobby of the original World Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City. Katarina Feder, director of business development at ARS, said, "We sold out all 2,100 tokens, and, importantly, brought in resale royalties for secondary sales, something that Frank has been championing for decades." published with ARS president Theodore Feder an op-ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located".
In the op-ed, Stella wrote,