Background

Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, United States. He was the oldest of three children of Frank Stella, a gynecologist, and Constance Aida (Santonelli) Stella.

Education

In 1950, after finishing high school, Stella entered Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he had remained till 1954. There, Frank received his first formal artistic education under the guidance of the abstract painter Patrick Morgan. Also, Stella studied at Princeton University, graduating with Bachelor of Arts degree in History in 1958.

Frank received many honorary degrees from different educational establishments, including Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 1974, Brandeis University and Dartmouth College, both in 1985.

Career

In 1958, after graduating from Princeton University, Stella moved to New York City, settling down in a storefront studio on the Lower East Side, then in a loft on West Broadway. At that time, he worked as a house painter a few days per week, making just enough money to support himself while he painted as an artist.

By the late 1958, Frank had embarked on his famous Black Paintings series, his response to the pictorial challenges, presented by Jasper Johns's target and flag paintings, which he had seen earlier that year in January. He used commercial enamel paint in a design of thin black stripes, separated by strips of unpainted canvas. Through his eradication of color and insistence on patterning and nonrelational symmetry, Stella sought to remove from his compositions any spatial references, explaining in a 1960 lecture at the Pratt Institute, that the solution he arrived at forced illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern.

During the summer of 1959, Frank showed the paintings both to Leo Castelli, who asked him to join his gallery, and Dorothy Miller, who invited him to participate in her "Sixteen Americans" exhibition, opening that December at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. This exhibition established him as one of the most radical young artists, working in the United States.

Stella's first one-person exhibition in New York City, held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in September 1960, featured his next major series — Aluminum paintings. He used commercial silver radiator paint, because, as Stella recalled, "you couldn't penetrate it, both literally and, I suppose, visually. It would appear slightly reflective and slightly hard and metallic". Here, he adopted a pattern of thin stripes, achieved by applying lines of metallic paint, separated by strips of raw canvas left in reserve. But he gave the overall design of the stripes slight jogs, that left empty areas at the canvas's edge. Frank decided to cut the empty areas out, resulting in his first shaped canvases. This pictorial solution was quickly adapted by a number of other artists throughout the decade and further explored by Stella in his next series, the Copper paintings, exhibited at Castelli's in 1962.

By the mid-1960s, Frank Stella was a leading figure of the art scene, with the work, that touched upon the main artistic impulses, from minimalism and pop to post-painterly and hard-edged abstraction. His works were included in ten museum group exhibitions in 1964, including the Whitney Annual and the Venice Biennale, and by that time, he had already had over ten solo exhibitions both in the United States and Europe. During this period, Stella also began delving into printmaking, an aspect of his work he has passionately pursued throughout his career.

Also, a major accomplishment of Stella's concern with shape was realized in 1966 in a series of paintings called the "Irregular Polygons". In these works, he abandoned the imagery of stripes, choosing instead to create literal and depicted shapes of a wholly abstract variety. One of the great achievements of the "Irregular Polygons" was that they rendered shape purely pictorial — that is, their shapes were felt to belong exclusively to the medium of painting.

Beginning in 1967, Frank worked on a group of paintings, known as the "Protractor Series". Their imagery consisted of sweeping arcs of brilliant color. They marked a new direction in Stella's work and he seemed to be aligning himself more with the coloristic exuberance of Henri Matisse, than with the structural austerity of Pablo Picasso.

In 1970, Stella was the youngest artist to have a retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, and then, receiving a second retrospective 17 years after. The same year, in 1970, he introduced the "Polish Village" series, the artwork, which was made up of paper, felt and painted canvas, pasted on a stretched canvas.

During the period from 1977 to 1979, Frank produced his Indian Bird series, which featured an assemblage of painted aluminum forms, protruding from the wall. These works reflected Frank's growing interest in three-dimensionality and dynamic textures. He continued pushing the idea, creating sculptural works, marked by elaborate tangles of curves, spirals and loops — pieces, whose exuberance present a stunning contrast to the more somber Black Paintings, that had first brought him into the public eye.

In the 1980's and 1990's, Stella expanded his three-dimensional paintings into increasingly explosive, vividly colored and multifaceted pieces, while continuing his work in printmaking. His series, based on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, includes works of many techniques, from metal reliefs to giant sculptures and mixed-media prints, combining diverse processes, such as woodblock printing, etching and hand-coloring.

Stella was very active in producing new works during the 1990's. He produced abstract sculptures, made of cast-plaster, stainless steel, brass and fiberglass. In 1990, Frank exhibited a block-long mural in Los Angeles for the Gas Company Tower in downtown. In 1993, his works became part of the architectural structure of the new Prince of Wales Theatre in Toronto. The lobbies on three floors and two grand stairwells contained nine computer-generated murals by Stella, three of which were more than 60 feet long. The fluid, dreamy patterns on the dome of the theater were designed by photo-plotting cigar smoke rings, blown by the artist. 3D reliefs were cast on the side panels of the aisle seats and painted in a velvet red.

In 1995, he exhibited six large stainless steel sculptures at the newly opened Gagosian Gallery. Each sculpture was named after a small town in the Hudson River Valley of New York. They invoked metaphors of both the landscape and industry of the area, suggesting smokestack-filled factories and rolling countryside. The largest was 8 feet tall and 18 feet in depth, named Bear Mountain. Also, at the Reina Sofia gallery in Madrid in 1996, Stella held another retrospective, displaying 45 works, dating from 1958 up through 1994.

Also, during his lifetime, Frank Stella served as a lecturer at different educational establishments, including Pratt Institute in Brooklyn (1960), Yale University (1965), Cornell University (1965), Harvard University (1983-1984) and others.

Currently, Stella lives and works in New York City.

Achievements

• 

  Frank Stella gained prominence as one the most dominant and influential figures in abstract painting during the period from the 1960's till the 1990's. During his lifetime, he received many awards, including the National Medal of Arts in 2009 from Barack Obama, Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture in 2011 from the International Sculpture Center and others.
  
  Today, his works are kept in the collections of different museums, art institutions and galleries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London and others.
  
  Stella's style had an influence both on some representatives of the next generation of artists and on the creation of new independent art movements. In particular, a sculptor Carl Andre took inspiration for his own sculptural compositions from Stella's Black Paintings. Stella's experiments with color and shape of canvases also inspired Kenneth Noland and contributed to the development of Color Field Painting and Post-Painterly Abstraction.
  
  In 2015, Stella’s work ‘Delaware Crossing’ was purchased at Sotheby's ‘Collection of A. Alfred Taubman: Masterworks’ in New York City for $13,690,000.
  
  

Works

More photos

• book

  • Working Space

    (Working Space affords a rare opportunity to view painting...)

    1986

• installation

  • The Musket

  • Odelsk III

  • Salta nel mio Sacco

  • The Mat-Maker

• painting

  • Blue Horizon

  • Fortín de las Flores

  • Untitled Abstraction

  • Astoria

  • Point of Pines (from Black Series II)

  • Green Solitaire

  • Sunapee I

  • Carl Andre (from the Purple Series)

  • Brazilian Merganser

  • Charlotte Tokayer (from the Purple Series)

  • Tetuan III

  • Casa Cornu (First Version)

  • Pegasus Three Double

  • Sidney Guberman, from Purple series

  • Tuxedo Park (from Black Series II)

  • Shoubeegi

  • Kufa Gate

  • Delaware Crossing

  • Oak Tree

  • Wolfeboro I

  • Talladega

  • The Waves I: Hark!

  • Furg

  • Polar Co-ordinates V

  • Aghtana III

  • Untitled (Green)

  • Turkish Mambo

  • Estoril Five II, from the Circuits series

  • Hampton Roads

  • Honduras Lottery Co.

  • Latah

  • Jill

  • Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II

  • Harran II

  • Conway

  • Giufà e la berretta rossa, state II

  • Sabra III

  • Untitled

  • Polar Co-ordinates IV

  • River of Ponds I

  • Die Fahne Hoch!

  • Palmito Ranch

  • Khurasan Gate III

  • Lake City

  • Zambesi (from Black Series II)

  • Rayy Sketch

  • Gran Cairo

  • Jasper's Dilemma

  • Ifafa I from the V Series

  • Seward Park

  • Shards

  • Yellow Journal

  • Pagosa Springs

  • Untitled

  • Shards III

  • River of Ponds

  • Michapol I

  • Union I

  • Metropolitan Museum 'M'

  • River of Ponds IV

  • Limanora

  • Tomlinson Court Park

  • Color Maze

  • Polar Co-ordinates Variant IIIa

  • Swan Engraving Circle II, State III

  • La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness)

  • Front Cover, from Had Gadya series

  • Bogoria Sketch

  • Black Stack

  • Untitled

  • Protractor Variation IX

  • Pastel Stack

  • Eskimo Curlew

  • Hudson River Valley

  • Polar Co-ordinates VII

  • Olkienniki III

  • Shards Variant Ia

  • Guadalupe Island, Caracara

  • The Great Heidelburgh Tun

  • Bonne Bay

  • Sidi Ifni (from America's Hommage à Picasso)

  • Untitled

  • The Marriage of Reason and Squalor

  • Black Adder (V Series)

  • Fez 2

  • Kay Bearman (from the Purple Series)

  • Gezira (from Black Series II)

  • Sinjerli Variations IIa

  • Counterpane, from The Waves series

  • Referendum '70

  • Island No. 1p

  • Inaccessible Island Rail

  • Untitled (Black and Orange)

  • Untitled

  • Eccentric Polygons - Effingham

  • Riallaro

  • Pilica II

  • Les Indes Galantes IV

  • Telluride

  • Arbeit Macht Frei

  • Sunset Beach, Sketch

  • Del Mar (from Race Track Series)

  • Whale Watch

  • And the Holy One, blessed be He

  • Double Gray Scramble

  • Libertina

  • Empress of India

  • Sinjerli Variation IV

  • Talladega Three II, from the Circuits series

  • Star of Persia I

  • The Fountain

  • The Butcher Came and Slew the Ox

  • Firuzabad

  • Ifafa II

  • Olyka (III), from Paper Relief Project

  • One Small Goat Papa Bought for Two Zuzim

• sculpture

  • Giufà, la luna, i ladri e le guardie

  • Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X

Views

Quotations: "I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."

"No art is any good unless you can feel how it's put together. By and large it's the eye, the hand and if it's any good, you feel the body. Most of the best stuff seems to be a complete gesture, the totality of the artist's body; you can really lean on it."

"Architecture can't fully represent the chaos and turmoil that are part of the human personality, but you need to put some of that turmoil into the architecture, or it isn't real."

"You see what you know!"

"But, after all, the aim of art is to create space — space that is not compromised by decoration or illustration, space within which the subjects of painting can live."

"Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later."

"The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings. Keep my mouth shut. You'll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again, people will always tell you about it. Even if you were the source of what's wrong with it."

Membership

• 

  honorary member

  Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design , Israel

  1981

• 

  honorary member

  American Academy of Arts and Letters , United States

  1982 - 1983

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• "Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the necessity of painting. His stripes are the paths of brush on canvas. These path leads only into painting." — Carl Andre, a painter

Interests

• Artists

  Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns

Connections

In 1961, Stella married Barbara Rose, an art historian and art critic. Their marriage produced three children — Rachel, Michael and Laura. In 1969, the couple divorced. Some time later, in 1978, Frank married his second wife, Harriet McGurk.

Father:

Frank Stella

Mother:

Constance Aida (Santonelli) Stella

child:

Rachel Stella

child:

Michael Stella

child:

Laura Stella

ex-wife:

Barbara Rose

Wife:

Harriet McGurk

mentor:

Stephen Greene

mentor:

William C. Seitz

References

• Frank Stella: A Retrospective This landmark catalogue presents a retrospective study of Frank Stella, one of the most important figures in 20th-century American art.
  2015
• Frank Stella This book includes classic examples of each of Stella's many periods, such as the Black Paintings, Irregular Polygons, the Protractor paintings, the Circuits series, the metal reliefs and floor sculptures of the past two decades and an "ArchiSkulptur", conceived by the artist exclusively for the exhibition. With more than 660 color reproductions, this volume is as ambitious and spectacular as its subject.
  2012
• Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography Lavishly illustrated, this volume combines handsome color reproductions of nearly one hundred of Stella's paintings and prints with a wealth of images from the artist's collection and other sources, that vividly capture his spirit and interests.
  1995