For the Italian architect, see Franco Stella
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.
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, where Carl Andre, later to become a minimalist sculptor, was in the class ahead of him, but Andre said they never actually met. 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, Stella took art courses and was introduced to the New York art scene by painter Stephen Greene and art historian William C. Seitz, professors at the school who brought him to exhibitions in the city. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism.
In the 1970s, he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City. 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. The critic and essayist Megan O'Grady visited the studio in 2019, and writing for the New York Times Style Magazine, described it as a "hangar-like structure", its entrance marked by a piece of wood spray-painted with the name "Stella". She called the interior a "vast space more easily traversed by golf cart than on foot", divided into separate rooms for fabrication and display, with a curtain hanging in the rear behind which he kept his spray-painter, his industrial sander, and new works being assembled.
After moving to New York City in the late 1950s, Stella began to create works which emphasized the picture-as-object. His visits to the art galleries of New York, where he was exposed to the abstract expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock, had exerted a great influence on his development as an artist.
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. He made a splash in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown in the Sixteen Americans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, along with works by Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. Taking a reductionist approach to his art, Stella said he sought to demonstrate that he considered every painting as "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more". The same year, several of his paintings were included in the Three Young Americans showing at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College. A year later, his first gallery show at art dealer Leo Castelli's New York gallery gained him few sales. Stella shared studio space with Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, both of whom had attended Phillips Academy, and scrounged a living by renting cold-water flats and painting houses.
Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work. In a 1964 radio broadcast of a discussion of contemporary art with fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, 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", became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.
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.
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.