Frank Stella facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Frank Stella
Stella in 2012
Born	Frank Philip Stella (1936-05-12)May 12, 1936 Malden, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	May 4, 2024(2024-05-04) (aged 87) West Village, New York, U.S.
Education	Princeton University
Known for	Painter printmaker sculpture architect
Movement	Modernism, minimal art, abstract expressionism, geometric abstraction, abstract illusionism, lyrical abstraction, hard-edge painting, shaped canvas painting, color field painting
Awards	1984 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton lectures National Medal of Arts

Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lived and worked in New York City.

Biography

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. He was the oldest of their three children. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.

In his sophomore year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, 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. He is heralded for having created abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.

In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City. 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.

Work

Late 1950s and early 1960s

Jasper's Dilemma (1962-1963) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Upon moving to New York City, he began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object.

Stella 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.

Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work, dismissing them with his well-known tautology, "What you see is what you see", which became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.

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". In 1978 he married pediatrician Harriet McGurk.

Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!" or "Raise the Flag!" in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, an anthem of the Nazi Party

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 the same year.

From 1960 his works used shaped canvases, developing in 1966 into more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series (67).

In 1967, Stella began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, which feature arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s.

Late 1960s and early 1970s

Frank Stella Harran II, 1967

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, which he came to call "maximalist" painting for its sculptural qualities. After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (1973), his Minimalism became baroque. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project. 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."

In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial.

1980s and afterward

Frank Stella "La scienza della fiacca, 1984, oil paint, enamel paint, and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Stella's Memantra, 2005, exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frank Stella in 2012

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. To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created by assistants (eg. La scienza della fiacca from 1984.

In 1993, he created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia at the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in Houston, Texas. A monumental sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, ein Schauspiel, 3x [D#8], 2001, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

The titles for Stella's Scaralatti Sonata Kirkpatrick series were triggered by the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.

From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored. After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio.

By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures. 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. 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. 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.

Artists' rights

On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella was a member artist of the Artists Rights Society) 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".

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...

Gallery of works

• 

  Frank Stella, mural at 'David Mirvish Books', 1974; in Toronto

• 

  Stella, detail of BMW 3.0 CSL car-painting, 1976

• 

  Stella, BMW M1 Pro car-painting, 1979; commissioned by Peter Gregg

• 

  Stella, Cones and Pillars, part 2., c. 1984; painting

• 

  Stella, Moby Dick, 1991–1993; wall-relief in The Ritz-Carlton, Singapore

• 

  Stella, Peekskill, 1995; sculpture of premium steel at Ernst-Abbe-Platz in Jena, Germany

• 

  Stella, Cornucopia, c. 2000; sculpture in fiberglass

• 

  Stella, Çatal Hüyük, 2008; location, Hallbergsplatsen, Borås

Exhibitions

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). The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a second retrospective of Stella's work in 1970.

In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

Frank Stella's work Protractor Variation I (1969) is featured in the collections display of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, Florida.

Selected solo exhibitions

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "The Shaped Canvas," New York, NY, December 9–January 3, 1964
• Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella," New York, NY, March 26–May 31, 1970
• Phillips Collection, "Frank Stella," Washington, D.C., November 3–December 2, 1973
• Baltimore Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: The Black Paintings," Baltimore, MD, November 23, 1976 – January 23, 1977
• Fort Worth Art Museum, "Stella Since 1970," Fort Worth, TX, March 19–April 30, 1978
• The Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella: The Indian Bird Maquettes," New York, NY, March 12–May 1, 1979
• Jewish Museum (Manhattan), "Frank Stella. Polish Wooden Synagogues –Constructions from the 1970s," New York, NY, February 9–May 1, 1983
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Resource / Response / Reservoir. Stella Survey 1959-1982," San Francisco, CA, March 10–May 1, 1983
• Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, "Frank Stella: Selected Works," Cambridge, MA, December 7, 1983 – January 26, 1984
• The Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella: 1970-1987," New York, NY, October 10, 1987 – January 5, 1988
• Waddington Galleries, "Frank Stella," London, UK, March 29–April 20, 2000
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "What You See Is What You See: Frank Stella and the Anderson Collection at SFMOMA," San Francisco, CA, June 11–September 6, 2004
• Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums, "Frank Stella 1958," Cambridge, MA, February 4–May 7, 2006
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture," New York, NY, May 1–July 19, 2007
• Neue Nationalgalerie, "Stella & Calatrava. The Michael Kohlhass Curtain," Berlin, Germany, April 15–August 14, 2011
• The Phillips Collection, "Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series," Washington, D.C., June 11 –September 4, 2011
• Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, "Frank Stella. The Retrospective. Works 1958-2012," Wolfsburg, Germany, September 8, 2012 – January 20, 2013
• Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, "Inflated Star and Wood Star," London, UK, February 18–May 17, 2015
• Whitney Museum of American Art, "Frank Stella: A Retrospective," New York, NY, October 30, 2015 – February 7, 2016
• POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, "Frank Stella and the Synagogues of Old Poland," Warsaw, Poland, February 18–June 20, 2016
• NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, "Frank Stella: Experiment and Change," Fort Lauderdale, FL, November 11, 2017 – July 29, 2018
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: Selection from the Permanent Collection," Los Angeles, CA, May 5–September 2, 2019
• Marianne Boesky Gallery, "Frank Stella: Recent Work," New York, NY, April 25–May 31, 2019
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Heads or Tails (1988), Cambridge, MA, permanent display
• Skirball Cultural Center, "Frank Stella: Had Gadya," Los Angeles, CA, April 4–September 1, 2024

Collections

In 2014, Stella gave his sculpture Adjoeman (2004) as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; the Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Toledo Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; and many others.

Recognition

Stella gave 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 under the title Working Space.

In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center. 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.

Art market

In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for Stella's Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.

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.

Personal life and death

From 1961 to 1969, Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.

Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, on May 4, 2024, at the age of 87.

See also

In Spanish: Frank Stella para niños