Frank Stella

Frank Stella (1936 - 2024) has been exhibiting in major art museums since his twenties and, working in various media, has been as prodigious and prolific as Pablo Picasso and Jasper Johns. After graduating with a history degree from Princeton University in 1958, the young artist from Malden, Massachusetts, moved to New York City and painted all summer, expecting to be drafted into the armed forces. A minor childhood injury to his finger made Stella ineligible for the draft, but rather than enter law school as his father wished, Stella continued to paint. Through his friend Johns he attracted the attention of Leo Castelli, who showed his work in 1959. Curator Dorothy Miller included Stella’s black paintings in the pivotal Sixteen Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art that same year.

Stella’s art during the 1960s and 1970s exemplified and propelled the art movement known as Minimalism. Like Pop Art, Minimalism developed in reaction to its modernist predecessor Abstract Expressionism, which had emphasized the individuality of the artist, celebrated gesture, and favored artistic process over product. To its critics, Minimalist work seemed overly simplistic and/or banal. It was essentially non-objective and stressed the importance of the formal properties of the art object. To a Minimalist, a painting was first and foremost an object, a flat surface of canvas pulled taut over stretcher bars on which paint was applied. Stella’s Minimalist paintings were extremely large, frequently monochromatic, and usually developed as a series.

The black paintings (1958–1960) brought Stella his first critical attention. In them, he painted black bands of paint directly on an unprimed, oversized canvas using house paint and brushes. In the ensuing aluminum series, he began to shape his canvases and, in subsequent paintings, the stretcher frames jutted further out from the wall, emphasizing the paintings’ edges and thicknesses. He continued his investigation of the formal properties of his shaped canvases and mounted a solo exhibition almost every year. His canvases grew larger and more decorative with bright colors, as in the protractor series of the mid-sixties. In 1967, Stella met and began collaborating with master printmaker Kenneth Tyler at the Gemini Graphic Editions Limited (G.E.L.) workshop in Los Angeles. While he continued to make significant prints, Stella also expanded his repertoire to include bold and imposing painted wall reliefs and sculpture, fully transcending his position as a “minimalist.”