Frank Stella is an American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the
areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella continues to live
and work in New York. Biography
Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian
descent. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was an artistically
inclined housewife who attended fashion school and later took up landscape
painting. After attending high school at Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he
majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New
York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced
by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to
New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded
postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating
abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or
metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
Today, Stella lives in Greenwich Village and keeps an office there but commutes
on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York.
Work = Late 1950s and early 1960s=
Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by
most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding
himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and
the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which
emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of
something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the
artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art
critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface
with paint on it - nothing more". This was a departure from the technique of
creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by
simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house
paint. This new aesthetic found expression in a
series of new paintings, the Black Paintings in which regular bands of
black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die
Fahne Hoch! is one such painting. It takes its name from the first line of
the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party,
and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that
organization. It has been suggested that the title has a double meaning,
referring also to Jasper Johns' paintings of flags. In any case, its
emotional coolness belies the contentiousness its title might suggest,
reflecting this new direction in Stella's work. Stella’s art was
recognized for its innovations before he was twenty-five. In 1959, several of his
paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art
Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of
Modern Art in New York. From 1960 Stella began to produce
paintings in aluminium and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular
lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings.
However they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using
shaped canvases, often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into
more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series, for example.
Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically
arranged in straight or curved lines. Later he began his Protractor Series of
paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders are
arranged side-by-side to produce full and half circles painted in rings of
concentric color. These paintings are named after circular cities he had
visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. The Irregular Polygon
canvases and Protractor series further extended the concept of the shaped
canvas. = Late 1960s and early 1970s=
Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s,
working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. Stella
produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called
Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's abstract prints in lithography, screenprinting,
etching and offset lithography had a strong impact upon printmaking as an
art. In 1967, he designed the set and
costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. 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. During the following
decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, which he came to call
“maximalist” painting for its sculptural qualities. Ironically, the paintings
that had brought him fame before 1960 had eliminated all such depth. The
shaped canvases took on even less regular forms in the Eccentric Polygon
series, and elements of collage were introduced, pieces of canvas being
pasted onto plywood, for example. His work also became more three-dimensional
to the point where he started producing large, free-standing metal pieces,
which, although they are painted upon, might well be considered sculpture.
After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series,
created in high relief, he began to use aluminum as the primary support for his
paintings. As the 1970s and 1980s progressed, these became more elaborate
and exuberant. Indeed, his earlier Minimalism [more] became baroque, marked
by curving forms, Day-Glo colors, and scrawled brushstrokes. Similarly, his
prints of these decades combined various printmaking and drawing techniques. In
1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house. In 1976, Stella was
commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the
BMW Art Car Project. He has said of this project, "The starting point for the art
cars was racing livery. In the old days there used to be a tradition of
identifying a car with its country by color. Now they get a number and they
get advertising. It’s a paint job, one way or another. The idea for mine was
that it’s from a drawing on graph paper. The graph paper is what it is, a graph,
but when it’s morphed over the car’s forms it becomes interesting, and
adapting the drawing to the racing car’s forms is interesting. Theoretically it’s
like painting on a shaped canvas." In 1969, Stella was commissioned to
create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. Medals
incorporating the design were struck to mark the occasion.
= 1980s and afterward= From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s,
Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman
Melville’s Moby-Dick. During this time, the increasingly deep relief of Stella’s
paintings gave way to full three-dimensionality, with sculptural
forms derived from cones, pillars, French curves, waves, and decorative
architectural elements. To create these works, the artist used collages or
maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created with the aids of assistants,
industrial metal cutters, and digital technologies.
In the 1990s, Stella began making free-standing sculpture for public
spaces and developing architectural projects. In 1993, for example, he
created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre,
which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. His 1993 proposal for a
Kunsthalle and garden in Dresden did not come to fruition. In 1997, he painted
and oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot "Stella Project" which
serves as the centerpiece of the theater and lobby of the Moores Opera House
located at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music on the campus of
the University of Houston, in Houston, TX. His aluminum bandshell, inspired by
a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 2001; a monumental
Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in
Washington, D.C. Stella's wall-hung Scarlatti K Series
was triggered by the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti and the writings
of the U.S. 20th-century harpsichord virtuoso and musicologist Ralph
Kirkpatrick, who made the sonatas widely known. Scarlatti wrote more than 500
keyboard sonatas; Stella's series today includes about 150 works.
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. His nearly
30-year stewardship of the building resulted in the facade being cleaned and
restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for
Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New
York City Landmark. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village
apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio.
Artists' rights Stella remains active in protecting the
rights for his fellow artists. On June 6, 2008, Stella published 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,
Exhibitions Stella’s work was included in several
important exhibitions that defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas and Systemic Painting. The Museum of
Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella’s work in 1970.
His art has since been the subject of several retrospectives in the United
States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was
shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. In 2015, The Whitney Museum of American Art
is presenting a retrospective of Stella’s career to date. The show will
feature approximately one hundred twenty works, including paintings, reliefs,
maquettes, sculptures, and drawings. Collections
Stella's work is included in major international collections, including the
Menil Collection, Houston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington,
D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; the Toledo
Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 2014, Stella
gave his sculpture Adjoeman as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical
Center in Los Angeles. Recognition
Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard
University to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984. Calling for a
rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six
talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title
Working Space. In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the
National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2011, he received the
Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the
International Sculpture Center. Art market
Stella joined dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists in 1959. Since 2014,
he has been represented worldwide in an exclusive arrangement shared by
Dominique Lévy Gallery and Marianne Boesky.
Gallery Interviews
Heti, Sheila. "'I'm All in Favor of the Shifty Artist'". The Believer 6: 40–46.
De Antonio, Emile, Painters Painting: The New York Art Scene: 1940-1970, 1973.
Arthouse films References
More references Busch, Julia M.: A decade of sculpture:
the 1960s, Associated University Presses, 1974; ISBN 0-87982-007-1
Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Frank Stella. Die
Schriften Frank Stellas, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, 2001; ISBN
3-88375-487-0, ISBN 978-3-88375-487-1 Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl:
Heinrich von Kleist by Frank Stella, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, 2001;
ISBN 3-88375-488-9, ISBN 978-3-88375-488-8
[2] Frank Stella and Siri Engberg: Frank
Stella at Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, 1997; ISBN 9780935640588
External links Frank Stella in the National Gallery of
Australia's Kenneth Tyler Collection Word Symbol Space An exhibition
featuring work by Frank Stella at The Jewish Museum, NY.
Frank Stella interviewed by Robert Ayers, March 2009
Works of art, auction & sale results, exhibitions, and artist information for
Frank Stella on artnet Guggenheim Museum online Biography of
Frank Stella Stella's work in the Guggenheim
Collection Stella mural installation, Princess of
Wales Theatre, Toronto Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography
by Sidney Guberman Frank Stella Papers at the Smithsonian's
Archives of American Art Frank Stella: Scarlatti and Bali
Sculpture Series / Paracelsus Building, St. Moritz. Video at VernissageTV.
Frank Stella 1958 poet William Corbett writes about the exhibition titled Frank
Stella 1958 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Cambridge,
Massachusetts February 4–May 7, 2006 Laying the Tracks Others Followed; Early
Work at L&M Arts; New York Times; Roberta Smith; April 26, 2012