Frank Stella

born Malden, MA (USA) 1936

Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts. He studied painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts and later studied history at Princeton University.

He became influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. However, upon moving to New York City around the late 1950s, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of that 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. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more".

This new aesthetic found expression in a series of paintings in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin white pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such painting. It takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from an anthem of the Hitler Youth, 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.

As well as their influence on other painters, these paintings were an important influence on the development of minimalist sculpture. Stella was a friend of two of the most significant figures in that field, Carl Andre and Donald Judd.

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 of the mid-1960s, for example.

Also in the 1960s, Stella began to use a wider range of colors, typically arranged in straight or curved lines. In 1967 he began his Protractor Series 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.

In the 1970s Stella's style underwent a dramatic change. The carefully constructed geometric designs executed in flat planes of color were replaced by a "looser" style sometimes reminiscent of graffiti. 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.

Stella has gone on to produce a number of large works for public spaces, and the three-dimensionality of his work has led to him being commissioned to produce architecture, including a bandshell for the city of Miami, Florida.

Stella continues to produce works in this style and lives in New York City.

Select Timeline

• 1967 - First Prize, International Biennial Exhibition of Paintings, Tokyo
• 1981 - New York City Mayor's Award for Arts and Culture
• 1981 - Medal for painting at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan
• 1981 - Honorary Fellowship from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem
• 1984 - Honorary Doctor of Arts, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ
• 1985 - Award of American Art from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
• 1985 - Honorary Degree from Dartmouth College
• 1986 - Honorary Degree Brandeis University

Select Exhibitions

• 1970 - Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• 1987 - Retrospective, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
• 1998 - Rendez-vous, Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York, NY
• 1998 - Frank Stella: New Paintings, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
• 1998 - Frank Stella: Smoke Rings, Knoedler & Company, New York, NY
• 1999 - Abstraction, Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris
• 1999 - Drawing is Another Kind of Language, Parrish Art Museum, organized by Harvard Museums, Southampton, NY
• 1999 - Frank Stella: Easel Paintings, Bernard Jacobson Gallery, London
• 1999 - Frank Stella: New Work, Sperone Westwater, New York, NY
• 2001 - Prince of Homburg, Installation on the lawn of the National Gallery, Washington D.C.
• 2001 - Heinrich von Kleist, Traveling exhibition, Jena, Hildesheim, Stuttgart, Berlin and Singapore

Select Artwork

• Sinjerli Variations, 1977
• Bilbimsterol from Imaginary Places II, 1996
• Sunapee 1, 1965
• Khurasan Gate Variation III, 1968
• Black Adder, 1968
• Kingsbury Run (Aluminum Series), 1970
• Quathlamba II (from V series), 1968

Quotes

• "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."
• "Abstract paintings must be as real as those created by the 16th century Italians."
• "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."
• "I want to make exalted art. A successful image has pictorial lift. I am looking for whatever is up there."
• "I was worried in the '80s that the best abstract painting had become obsessed with materiality, and painterly gestures and materiality were up against the wall."
• "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."
• "Up until 35 I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."
• "When I'm painting the picture, I'm really painting a picture. I may have a flat-footed technique, or something like that, but still, to me, the thrill, or the meat of the thing, is the actual painting. I don't get any thrill out of laying it out."
• "I hate to say this.. it's made to order. Then, I disorder it a little bit or, I should say, I reorder it. I wouldn't be so presumptuous to claim that I had the ability to disorder it. I wish I did."
• "I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting - the humanistic values that they… find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there… What you see is what you get."

Publications

• Frank Stella 1958 - by Harry Cooper, Megan R. Luke, Harvard Art Museums, Yale University Press (February 27, 2006)
• Black Paintings: Robert Rauschenberg, Ad Reinhardt, Mark Rothko, Frank Stella - by Stephanie Rosenthal, Hatje Cantz (January 1, 2007)
• Frank Stella (MOMA 1970) - by William S. Rubin, NY: Museum of Modern Art; NY Graphic Soc; 1st edition (1970)
• Frank Stella: Schriften / Writings - by Frank Stella, Franz-Joachim Verspohl, Verlag Der Buchhandlung Walther Konig; Bilingual edition (January 2002)
• Frank Stella: Paintings 1958 to 1965 : A Catalogue Raisonne - by Lawrence Rubin, Workman Pub Co; 1st ed edition (September 1986)
• Frank Stella - by William S Rubin, Museum of Modern Art; New Ed edition (June 1978)
• Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics - by Frank Stella, Siri Engberg, Walker Art Center (May 1997)
• Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography - by Sidney Guberman, Rizzoli International Publications (November 15, 1995)
• Stella since 1970: (exhibition) The Fort Worth Art Museum [March 19-April 30 1978 - by Frank Stella, distributed by Art Catalogues (1978)

Quick Facts

• Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism, post-painterly abstraction and offset lithography.
• He became influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.
• 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.
• 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 1993, Stella was commissioned to produce 10,000 sq. feet of murals to decorate the interior lobbies, the ceiling dome, the sounding board and the exterior of the fly tower of Toronto, Canada's new Princess of Wales Theatre.

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