Frank Stella
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Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is
an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in
minimalism, post-painterly abstraction, patterns and offset
lithography.
He was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at
Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton
University, where he painted, influenced by the abstract expressionism
of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and majored in history. Early
visits to New York art galleries would prove to be an influence upon
his artistic development. Stella moved to New York in 1958 after his
graduation. He is one the most well-regarded postwar American painters
who still works today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in
consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career.
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 paintings, the
Black Paintings (60) in which regular bands of black paint were
separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch!
(1959) is one such painting. It takes its name ("The flag on high" in
English) 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 (60). Stella joined dealer Leo Castelli’s stable of artists in
1959. From 1960 he began to produce paintings in aluminum 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
(canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square),
often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more
elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), 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 (71) 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.
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 1960's
starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968. Stella's abstract
prints in lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography
(a technique he introduced) had a strong impact upon printmaking as an
art.
In 1967, Stella 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 (73), 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.
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
aid 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. 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 work was included in several important exhibitions that
defined 1960s art, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The
Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). His art has been
the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe,
and Japan. 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. The artist continues to live and work in New
York.
