Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their three children.[1] 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[2] who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.[3]
In his sophomore year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts,[4] the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, a teacher at the school, began teaching Stella how to paint. After entering Princeton University to earn a degree in history, Stella took art courses and was introduced to the New York art scene by painter Stephen Greene and art historian William Seitz, professors at the school who brought him to exhibitions in the city. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism.[1] He is heralded by the Birmingham Museum of Art for having created abstract paintings that bear "no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting".[5]
In the 1970s, he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.[6] As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York.[3]
Work
Late 1950s and early 1960s
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.[7]
He created a series of paintings in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. Using commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush, he painted 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.[8]
Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work, dismissing them with his well-known tautology, "What you see is what you see",[8] which became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.[9]
Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!"[10] or "Raise the Flag!" in English) from the first line of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied",[11] the anthem of the Nazi Party. According to Stella himself, the painting has similar proportions as flags used by that organization.[12]
From 1960, his works used shaped canvases,[13] developing in 1966 into more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series (67).[14]
Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961.[15] Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more".[16]
Late 1960s and early 1970s
In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham.[17] The same year, his began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, which feature arcs, sometimes overlapping,[18] within square borders named after circular-plan cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s.[19][20]
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.[21]
In the next decade, Stella brought to his artistic productions the element of relief, which he called "maximalist" painting because it had sculptural attributes. He presented wood and other materials in his Polish Village series (1970–1973), executed in high relief. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as these works became more uninhibited and intricate, his minimalism became baroque.[17] In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Series.[22] He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas."[23]
In 1978, he married pediatrician Harriet McGurk.[25]
1980s and afterward
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella produced a large oeuvre that grappled with Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick in a broad way.[2] In this period of his career, as the relief of his paintings became increasingly higher with more undercutting, the process eventually resulted in fully three-dimensional sculptural forms that he derived from decorative architectural elements, and incorporating French curves, pillars, waves, and cones. To generate these works, he made collages or scale models that were subsequently enlarged to the original's specifications by his assistants, along with the use of digital technology and industrial metal cutters.[17]
By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures.[36] The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits.[36] His Jasper's Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at 7 World Trade Center in 2021.[37] In late 2022, Stella launched an NFT (non-fungible token) that includes the right to the CAD files to 3D print the art works in the NFTs.[38]
Artists' rights
On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella was a member artist of the Artists Rights Society[39]) 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".[40]
In the op-ed, Stella wrote,
The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search.
The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work.[40]
Stella's work was included in several exhibitions in the 1960s, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966).[41] The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a second retrospective of Stella's work in 1970.[17]
Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.[46] These six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.[47]
In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.[48] In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center.[49] In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Jena in Jena, Germany, where his large sculptures of the "Hudson River Valley Series" are on permanent display, becoming the second artist to receive this honorary degree after Auguste Rodin in 1906.[50]
Art market
In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for one of Stella's works with the sale of his Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.[51]
In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/Ascending Green Values (1977) was sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million with premium) in London. The painting was bought for $1.9 million in 2006 from the collection of Belgian art patrons Roger and Josette Vanthournout at Sotheby's.[52]
Personal life and death
From 1961 to 1969, Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.[15] At the time of his death, he was married to Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician.[9] They had two sons, Patrick and Peter.[9] He also had two children from his first marriage and a daughter from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages.[9]
Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, on May 4, 2024, eight days before his 88th birthday.[9]
Selected bibliography
Julia M. Busch: A Decade of Sculpture: the 1960s, Associated University Presses, Plainsboro, 1974; ISBN0-87982-007-1
Frank Stella and Siri Engberg: Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997; ISBN9780935640588
Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Frank Stella. Die Schriften Frank Stellas, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN3-88375-487-0, ISBN978-3-88375-487-1 (bilingual)
Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: Heinrich von Kleist by Frank Stella, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN3-88375-488-9, ISBN978-3-88375-488-8 (bilingual)
^Salus, Carol (2010). "Frank Stella's Polish Village Series and Related Works: Heritage and Alliance". Shofar. 28 (2): 142. ISSN0882-8539. JSTOR10.5703/shofar.28.2.139. Archived from the original on September 21, 2023. Retrieved May 5, 2024. The artist provided a number of factors involved in his selection of Die Fahne Hoch! With its title taken from the first line of the Horst Wessel song (Die Fahne hoch! Die Reihen fest geschlossen!), the Nazi Party anthem, this march song was sung at public meetings and used as a musical background for the Nuremburg rallies of the 1930s. Stella said for him it recalled a waving flag, adding: "The thing that stuck in my mind was the Nazi newsreels—that big draped swastika—the big hanging flag—has pretty much those dimensions." Stella pointed out that the proportions of his canvas (10'1" x 6'1") are much the same as the large flags displayed by the Nazis.
^ abcdeGuggenheim Staff (2024). "Frank Stella". The Guggenheim Museums and Foundation. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation. Archived from the original on May 6, 2024. Retrieved May 6, 2024.
^Metropolitan Museum of Art Staff. "Frank Stella | YAZD III". The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Archived from the original on May 5, 2024. Retrieved May 5, 2024.
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