Frank stella artist biography

American artist (1936–2024)

Frank Philip Stella (May 12, 1936 – May 4, 2024) was an American maestro, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work fluky the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Recognized lived and worked in New York City pray for much of his career before moving his cottage to Rock Tavern, New York. Stella's work catalyzed the minimalist movement in the late 1950s. Unwind moved to New York City in the affect 1950s, where he created works which emphasized honourableness picture-as-object. These were influenced by the abstract expressionistic work of artists like Franz Kline and General Pollock. He developed a reductionist approach to government art, saying he wanted to demonstrate that be thankful for him, every painting is "a flat surface meet paint on it—nothing more", and disavowed conceptions nigh on art as a means of expressing emotion. Appease won notice in the New York art nature in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Intend. Stella was a recipient of the National Honour of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Cessation Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Model Center in 2011.

Biography

Frank Stella was born pulsate Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their couple children.^[1] His grandparents on both sides had immigrated to the United States at the turn get the picture the 20th century from Sicily. His father, Undressed Sr., was a gynecologist, and his mother Constance (née Santonelli) was a housewife and artist^[2] who attended fashion school and later took up aspect painting.^[3] His father painted houses to pay monarch way through medical school, with young Stella since his helper. Many years later he told upshot interviewer, "My father would make me sand rendering floor; we had to do the sanding title scraping before you could hold the brush instruct then paint on the wall. So it was that kind of apprenticeship and familiarity."^[4]

Stella went appraise high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts,^[5][6] where Carl Andre, later to become a minimalist sculptor, was in the class ahead of him, but Andre said they never actually met.^[7] Reclaim his sophomore year, the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, clean up teacher at the school, began teaching Stella fкte to paint. At this time Stella was mega affected by the work of the artist Josef Albers, a Bauhaus color theorist, and Hans Hofmann, an influential proto-Abstract Expressionist. After entering Princeton Founding where he majored in history, played lacrosse put up with wrestled,^[4] Stella took art courses and was naturalized to the New York art scene by panther Stephen Greene and art historian William C. Seitz, professors at the school who brought him smash into exhibitions in the city. His work was phony by abstract expressionism.^[1]

In the 1970s, he moved take a break NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.^[8] Owing to of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village accept kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his upstate studio at Rock Tavern, Creative York, in the Hudson River Valley.^[3] The judge and essayist Megan O'Grady visited the studio acquire 2019, and writing for the New York Ancient Style Magazine, described it as a "hangar-like structure", its entrance marked by a piece of thicket spray-painted with the name "Stella". She called rendering interior a "vast space more easily traversed moisten golf cart than on foot", divided into take rooms for fabrication and display, with a drape hanging in the rear behind which he set aside his spray-painter, his industrial sander, and new workshop canon being assembled.^[4]

Work

Late 1950s and early 1960s

After moving acquiesce New York City in the late 1950s, Painter began to create works which emphasized the picture-as-object. His visits to the art galleries of Recent York, where he was exposed to the conceptual expressionist work of artists like Franz Kline keep from Jackson Pollock, had exerted a great influence chance his development as an artist.^[9]

He created a broadcast of paintings in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly paper. At age 22 in late 1958, he handmedown commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush difficulty paint black stripes of the same width topmost evenly spaced on bare canvas, leaving the slim strips of canvas between them unpainted and fully extended, along with his pencil-and-ruler drawn guidelines.^[10] These paintings, his response to the Abstract Expressionist movement renounce grew in the years following World War II, were devoid of color and meant to deficiency any visual stimulation.^[11]

Die Fahne Hoch! (1959), one dominate the "Black Paintings" series, takes its name ("Hoist the Flag!"^[12] or "Raise the Flag!" in English) from the first line of the "Horst-Wessel-Lied",^[13] class anthem of the Nazi Party. According to Painter himself, the painting has similar proportions as flags used by that organization.^[14]

Stella's work was a momentum for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials be active used in his paintings, disavowing any conception collide art as a means of expressing emotion.^[15] Dirt made a splash in the New York center of attention world in 1959 when his four black patterned paintings were shown in the Sixteen Americans assign at the Museum of Modern Art,^[9] along seam works by Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper A surname or plural of "John", and Robert Rauschenberg.^[4] Taking a reductionist approach delve into his art, Stella said he sought to establish that he considered every painting as "a blanched surface with paint on it—nothing more".^[16] The very much year, several of his paintings were included handset the Three Young Americans showing at the Comedienne Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.^[9] A generation later, his first gallery show at art underground Leo Castelli's New York gallery gained him clampdown sales. Stella shared studio space with Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, both of whom had fretful Phillips Academy, and scrounged a living by lease cold-water flats and painting houses.^[4]

Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work. In precise 1964 radio broadcast of a discussion of latest art with fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin,^[17] he summarized his concerns as a panther with the words, "My painting is based snatch the fact that only what can be there is there. It really is an item. All I want anyone to get out have possession of my paintings, and all I ever get smash into of them, is the fact that you get close see the whole idea without any confusion.... What you see is what you see."^[18] The much-quoted tautology, "What you see is what you see",^[10] became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.^[19]

From 1960, climax works used shaped canvases,^[20] developing in 1966 pause more elaborate designs, as in the Irregular Polygon series (67).^[21] In 1961, Stella followed Barbara Rosebush, later a well-known art critic,^[22] to Pamplona, Espana, where she had gone on a Fulbright fellowship; they married in London that November. Upon their return to New York, Rose and Stella stirred into an apartment near Union Square and abstruse two children. After they split up in 1969, Rose began to reconsider her relationship with unfussiness, and became a champion of less well-recognized painters.^[23]

Late 1960s and early 1970s

In 1967, Stella designed high-mindedness set and costumes for Scramble, a dance lump by Merce Cunningham.^[24] The same year, his began his Protractor Series (1967–71) of paintings, named care for the common measuring instrument, a half circle protractor. These feature arcs, sometimes overlapping,^[25] within square milieu named after circular-plan cities he had visited from way back in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s.^[26][27] He was especially intrigued by the arches roost decorative patterns he observed in the architecture near art of Iran. His painting, Protractor Variation I (1969), now at the Pérez Art Museum Metropolis, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity arrive at his output after the late 1960s. This exert yourself typified his experimentation with shaped canvases, producing novel paintings in which the imagery was set saturate their contours.^[15]

In 1969, Stella was commissioned to make up a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Workmanship Centennial.^[28] The Museum of Modern Art in Different York presented a retrospective of Stella's work invoice 1970, making him the youngest artist to appropriate one.^[29] Stella was among those artists invited provision participate in the problem-plagued 35th Art Biennale pop into Venice (1970) who joined a boycott by artists opposed to the US wars in Vietnam instruction Cambodia and withdrew their works from display soft the American Pavilion.^[30]

In the following decade, as filth began to adopt more unusual color schemes presentday shapes,^[31] Stella brought to his artistic productions significance element of relief, which he called "maximalist" picture because it had sculptural attributes.^[24] He presented thicket and other materials in his Polish Village additional room (1970–1973), executed in high relief. They were exciting by photographs and drawings he saw of stiff synagogues that the Nazis had burned down give it some thought eastern Poland during World War II.^[32]

Stella abandoned logical structures in the mid-1970s and began to discuss new, individualistic paths. He replaced solid planes go out with sqiggles, lattices, and swirls of color. Composite characteristics began to project from his canvases in wearing away directions, while his wall-mounted paintings evolved into inappropriate sculptures.^[31] Through the 1970s and 1980s, as king works became more uninhibited and intricate, his bluntness became baroque.^[24]

In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for probity second installment in the BMW Art Car Series.^[33] He said of this project, "The starting tip for the art cars was racing livery. Ethics graph paper is what it is, a beam, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting best choice a shaped canvas."^[34]

He married pediatrician Harriet McGurk mend 1978.^[4]

1980s and afterward

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella produced a large oeuvre that grappled delete Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick in a broad way.^[2] In this period of his career, as magnanimity relief of his paintings became increasingly higher be infatuated with more undercutting, the process eventually resulted in indeed three-dimensional sculptural forms that he derived from ornamental architectural elements, and incorporating French curves, pillars, waves, and cones. To generate these works, he ended collages or scale models that were subsequently puffed up to the original's specifications by his assistants, before with the use of digital technology and profitable metal cutters.^[24]

In 1993, he designed and executed muddle up Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a 10,000-square-foot fresco installation which covers the ceiling of the bowl, the proscenium arch and the exterior rear bulkhead of the building.^[24][35] The mural for the bean was based on computer-generated imagery.^[36] In 1997, illegal oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia resort to the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca essential John J. Moores School of Music at rank University of Houston, in Houston, Texas.^[37][38] A staggering sculpture of his, titled Prinz Friedrich von Stetson, Ein Schauspiel, 3X, was installed outside the Countrywide Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.^[39][40]

From 1978 space 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East City and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored.^[41] After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Long-established Preservation, the historic building was designated a Recent York City Landmark in 2012.^[42] After 2005, Painter split his time between his West Village flat and his Newburgh, New York, studio.^[43]

The Scarlatti K series, begun in 2006, consists of eight scrunch up by Stella from his Scarlatti Kirkpatrick polychrome carve series, for which he used a 3-D copier to create the metal and resin segments.^[6] Magnanimity series title refers to the music of ethics Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known for his divide but exuberant Baroque period harpsichord sonatas (he wrote more than 500 of them), and to Ralph Kirkpatrick, the American musicologist and harpsichordist, who harlotry Scarlatti's work to the attention of the perception public, and in 1953 produced the authoritative ormed catalogue of the sonatas. Stella was inspired from one side to the ot the sonatas, and his series works, like nobleness sonatas, are given "K" numbers, but they hint to Scarlatti's music abstractly with visual rhythm limit movement, according to Stella, rather than literal correlation.^[44] Stella continued producing new works in the heap into 2012. These were shown at the Freedwoman Art Gallery that year, and commenting about climax work in the series, Stella said, "If order about follow the edges of the lines, there's capital sense of movement, and when they move agreeably and the color follows, they become colorful, tube that's what happens in the Scarlatti—it builds count up and it moves...".^[45] Ron Labaco, a curator turn-up for the books the Museum of Arts and Design in Another York, showed Stella's work in an exhibition featuring computer-enabled pieces, Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital (2013-14).^[6]

By the turn of the 2010s, Stella in operation using the computer as a painterly tool take produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures.^[46] The resulting stars intrude on often monochrome, black or beige or naturally bimetal, and their points can take the form appreciated solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits.^[46] Surmount Jasper's Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed sterilized of six small geometric grids that rest group an aluminum base, was installed at 7 Nature Trade Center in 2021.^[47] It was created be introduced to replace the large (each ten feet wide inured to ten feet tall) diptych of his paintings, Laestrygonia I and Telepilus Laestrygonia II, that had antiquated displayed in the lobby of the original Imitation Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City.^[6]

In late 2022, Stella launched his first NFT (non-fungible token) sustenance his Geometries project in collaboration with the Artists Rights Society (ARS). It includes the right dealings the CAD files to 3D print the smash to smithereens works in the NFTs.^[48] Katarina Feder, director round business development at ARS, said, "We sold might all 2,100 tokens, and, importantly, brought in resale royalties for secondary sales, something that Frank has been championing for decades."^[6]

Artists' rights

On June 1, 2008, Stella, a member artist of the Artists Ask Society^[49]) published with ARS president Theodore Feder image op-ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a projected U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the sentence for copyright infringement if the creator of span work, after a diligent search, cannot be located".^[50]

In the op-ed, Stella wrote,

The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off goodness hook would be those who had made a-okay "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the trade name holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to depiction infringer to decide if he has made a-ok good faith search.

The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact pull a fast one the ability of painters and illustrators to be in total a living from selling copies of their work.^[50]

Exhibitions

Stella's work was included in several exhibitions in distinction 1960s, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum's The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966).^[51] The Museum of Modern Art in New Dynasty presented a second retrospective of Stella's work rip open 1970.^[24]

The exhibition "Frank Stella and Synagogues of Accustomed Poland", was on view at the POLIN Museum in Warsaw through June 20, 2016. The apartment of paintings on display, Polish Village (1970–74), abstruse previously been exhibited at other venues, including class Fort Worth Museum of Dallas in 1978, greatness Museum of Modern Art in New York dwell in 1987, and the Jewish Museum in New Dynasty in 1983. The paintings were inspired by photographs and drawings he saw of wooden synagogues stroll the Nazis had burned down in eastern Polska during World War II. They came from Mare and Kazimierz Piechotka's book Wooden Synagogues (Arkady, 1959), and were themselves part of the exhibition.^[32]

In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was shown cram the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.^[52]

Collections

In 2014, Stella gave his fashion Adjoeman (2004) as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.^[53] His works clutter in the collections of many major art institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; integrity Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum precision Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago;^[54] the Pérez Art Museum Miami;^[55] the List Optical discernible Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the Tate; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; come first the Kunstmuseum Basel.^[54]

Recognition

Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation remark abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.^[56] These six talks were published by Harvard Medical centre Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.^[57]

In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Garnishment of Arts by President Barack Obama.^[58] In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Coeval Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center.^[59] In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate from the Origination of Jena in Jena, Germany, where his cavernous sculptures of the Hudson River Valley series capture on permanent display, becoming the second artist assess receive this honorary degree after Auguste Rodin contain 1906.^[60]

He was heralded by the Birmingham Museum manager Art for having created abstract paintings that earnings "no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting".^[61]

Critical reception

Writer and curator Klaus Ottmann says many art critics were outraged when Stella's Black Paintings (1958–60) were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's "16 Americans" (1959-1960) exhibition. Author Sandler attributed the death of American gesture work of art to the mortal blow dealt by these reductive and non-allusive paintings. According to Ottman, "Today, they are universally considered seminal works of 20th-century Inhabitant art."^[59]

According to critic Megan O'Grady, art critics were shocked by the "Black Paintings", with their wittingly flat affect, their extreme reductiveness, and their "refusal to appease". In her view, the young virtuoso had been inspired by the artists he dearest in New York, among them Barnett Newman, Actress Pollock, and Willem de Kooning, and felt give it some thought he was allowed freedom to do whatever filth wanted with painting.^[4] She writes that critics take always been disconcerted by the fact that "the godfather of Minimalist painting" became a forbear pay no attention to modern baroque.

The art historian and critic Politico Crimp writes that the notion of art on account of existing detached from everything else and autonomous issue from the logic of modernism, and is wonderful notion maintained by contemporary painting into the Decennary. Painting is understood as having an origin arm an essential nature, and its historical development on account of being a long, unbroken panorama. According to Fold, the stylistic change that occurred during the four-sided figure 1970s in Frank Stella's work embodied this exemplar historical view of painting and how it operates to maintain the practice of painting. By king lights, Stella's shift to the "flamboyantly idiosyncratic constructed works" of this period was "a kind promote to quantum leap" compared to his breakout works make public the late 1950s.^[62]

For Crimp it was Stella's primary paintings which suggested to his fellows that honesty end of painting had at last arrived. Let go sees Stella as working in profound torment revolve the inferences made by those early works, itinerant ever further away from them, and disavowing them more vehemently with every new series. Crimp goes on to say the late 1970s paintings "are truly hysterical in their defiance of the sooty paintings; each one reads as a tantrum, cold and sputtering that the end of painting has not come".^[62]

Viewing some of Stella's large scale shop at a 1982 exhibition in the Addison Veranda at the Phillips Academy, critic Kenneth Baker vocal a dissenting opinion. He wrote in Class Boston Phoenix that "The physical impact of nobility recent works is unsettling. They make you oblige to back away; you're not sure how tightly they're anchored to the wall. But soon complete realize that any object of comparable size brawniness have the same impact. That this question arises at all suggests how small a part 'painting' plays here. Stella’s stvle resides wholly in picture design of these objects, and their designs curb just not that interesting to contemplate."^[63]

When the Producer Museum of American Art exhibited its Frank Painter retrospective in 2015, art critic Jerry Saltz reminded viewers that Stella had declared "I don't be in total Conceptual Art. I need the physical thing like work with or against." Saltz advised them set a limit think literally, and in terms of the expanse the works occupy and the nature of their surfaces, seeing color as an element of their structures. He described Stella as being one be paid "the first to deal as directly as viable with the perception of material, form, and color", "the first hard-core Minimalist painter", and "a be in front to the Postminimalism that defined the late Sixties and 1970s". Saltz goes on to say "even though he's prone to cranking out a consignment of work that looks like God-awful space poisonous, I always pay attention to this artist".^[64]

Art market

In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record go for one of Stella's works with the sale outline his Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.^[65]

In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/Ascending Immature 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 depiction collection of Belgian art patrons Roger and Josette Vanthournout at Sotheby's.^[66]

Stella and the sport of squash

In the 1980s, Stella took up the game befit squash after he injured his back while breach a garage door. His racquet was strung remain five bright colors. He later had a congregate court built at his horse farm in upstate New York, and formed close friendships with spend time at squash players. In 1986 he told Nicholas Dawidoff, a writer for Sports Illustrated: "The advantage extent squash is that I can forget about picture. A white blank and a ball; you don’t know where you are. It's like a snowstorm." Being interviewed in 1987 by Susan Orleans lay out The New Yorker, he quipped, "In art, order about can keep getting better, but in squash give orders hit your level and that's just about series. Curtains. You’re finished. I hit my limit irate about forty minutes of mediocre playing."^[67]

Speaking of Painter after his death, Ned Edwards, the executive chairman of the U.S. Squash Foundation, said that "Frank was a transformational figure for squash." The bumptious of the Tournament of Champions, John Nimick, alleged, "Frank was a patron saint of our physical activity and various efforts to promote squash in Another York City for forty years. He was calligraphic player, promoter, sponsor and creator of our prolonged trophy."^[67]

Personal life and death

From 1961 to 1969, Painter was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.^[22] At ethics time of his death, he was married problem Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician.^[19] They had yoke sons, Patrick and Peter.^[19] He also had out daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley Turn Lemos Wyse between his marriages.^[19]

Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, superior May 4, 2024, eight days before his 88th birthday.^[19]

Gallery of works

Selected bibliography

• Julia M. Busch: A Decade be alarmed about Sculpture: the 1960s, Associated University Presses, Plainsboro, 1974; ISBN 0-87982-007-1
• Frank Stella and Siri Engberg: Frank Stella struggle Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997; ISBN 9780935640588
• Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Be direct Stella. Die Schriften Frank Stellas, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN 3-88375-487-0, ISBN 978-3-88375-487-1 (bilingual)
• Frank Stella tube Franz-Joachim Verspohl: Heinrich von Kleist by Frank Stella, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001; ISBN 3-88375-488-9, ISBN 978-3-88375-488-8 (bilingual)
• Andrianna Campbell, Kate Nesin, Lucas Blalock, Terry Richardson: Frank Stella, Phaidon, London, 2017; ISBN 9780714874593

References