Frank Stella
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Frank Stella

Frank Stella in Hollis Frampton's untitled from The Secret World of Frank Stella, 1958-1962 (Collection Walker Art Center)
1936–2024

Frank Stella has played a major role in the development of American abstraction during the 20th century. During his nearly 60-year career, Stella has explored the possibilities of abstract art in paintings, sculpture, and prints that push the conventions of each medium beyond its assumed limits. Though often inspired by literature, music, science, and history, his art is never illustrative; he insists that each of his works contains all the information necessary to understand it. His ultimate goal is to reinvigorate painting by inventing a new kind of pictorial space.

 

Early Life and Black Paintings

Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, and attended Princeton University, where he earned a degree in history.  After moving to New York City, he became interested in contemporary art, and in 1958, at age 22, he began his Black Paintings (1958–1960): parallel bands of uniform black stripes that cover the canvas from edge to edge. Coming at a time when Abstract Expressionism still dominated the art world. Stella’s straightforward explorations of painting’s structure and materials proposed a new way forward for painting. Today these works are considered to have ushered in the Minimalist movement of the 1960s.

 

Painting into Sculpture, Scramble

Throughout his career, Stella has worked in series, fully exploring a theme and its variations before moving on to a new painterly “problem.” During the 1960s, he experimented with unusually shaped canvases, a broad color palette, and complex geometric patterns in such series as Concentric Squares, Protractors, and Irregular Polygons. A major discovery came as a result of his 1967 invitation to design décor for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s Scramble. Stella stretched six fabric banners in spectral colors on moveable poles, in effect creating one of his stripe paintings in three dimensions.

 

He continued exploring this idea during the 1970s, making painted wall constructions of wood and aluminum as well as experimental prints of paper pulp and metals. As Stella’s work became structurally more intricate, his imagery gained in complexity, with each series borrowing elements from the one that preceded it. This additive process eventually resulted in works that were equal parts painting, sculpture, and printmaking. The artist’s Loomings 3X (1986), in the Walker’s collection, is a dynamic construction of painted and etched honeycomb aluminum, which is mounted on the wall but juts out into the viewer’s space.

 

Late Work and Recognition

Stella’s late works, with their aggressive colors, dynamic shapes, and complex networks of line, have become increasingly baroque and even fantastical. But they are a logical outgrowth of the artist’s early curiosity about how materials, forms, and structures can be combined to make a painting, a subject that continues to fascinate him. During the 1990s, Stella began using CAD (computer-aided design) and 3-D printing to design architectural proposals and freestanding sculptures for public spaces. His work has been the subject of several retrospectives, most recently a 2015 survey organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. In 2009, Stella received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.