Frank Stella

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their three children. 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 who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.

Stella went to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where Carl Andre, later to become a minimalist sculptor, was a classmate. In his sophomore year, 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 C. Seitz, professors at the school who brought him to exhibitions in the city. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism.

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.

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.

He created a series of paintings in 1958–1959 known as his "Black Paintings" which flouted conventional ideas of painterly composition. At age 22 in late 1958, he used commercial enamel paint and a house-painter's brush to paint 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. These paintings, his response to the Abstract Expressionist movement that grew in the years following World War II, were devoid of color and meant to lack any visual stimulation.

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

Stella's work was a catalyst for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials he used in his paintings, disavowing any conception of art as a means of expressing emotion. He made a splash in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown in the Sixteen Americans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Taking a reductionist approach to his art, he said he sought to demonstrate that he considered every painting as "a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more". The same year, several of his paintings were included in the Three Young Americans showing at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work. In a 1964 radio broadcast of a discussion of contemporary art with fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin, he summarized his concerns as a painter with the words, "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object... All I want anyone to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without any confusion.... What you see is what you see." The much-quoted tautology, "What you see is what you see", became "the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement", according to the New York Times.

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

Late 1960s and early 1970s

In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The same year, his began his Protractor Series (1967–71) of paintings, named after the common measuring instrument, a half circle protractor. These feature arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular-plan cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. He was especially intrigued by the arches and decorative patterns he observed in the architecture and art of Iran. His painting, Protractor Variation I (1969), now at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity of his output after the late 1960s. This work typified his experimentation with shaped canvases, producing innovative paintings in which the imagery was set by their contours.

In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial. 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. Stella was among those artists invited to participate in the problem-plagued 35th Art Biennale in Venice (1970) who joined a boycott by artists opposed to the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and withdrew their works from display at the American Pavilion.

In the following decade, as he began to adopt more unusual color schemes and shapes, 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. They were inspired by photographs and drawings he saw of wooden synagogues that the Nazis had burned down in eastern Poland during World War II. Through the 1970s and 1980s, as his works became more uninhibited and intricate, 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 Series. 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."

He married pediatrician Harriet McGurk in 1978.

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. 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.

In 1993, he designed and executed for Toronto's Princess of Wales Theatre a 10,000-square-foot mural installation which covers the ceiling of the dome, the proscenium arch and the exterior rear wall of the building. The mural for the dome was based on computer-generated imagery. 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, was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

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, the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark in 2012. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York, studio.

The Scarlatti K series, begun in 2006, consists of eight works by Stella from his Scarlatti Kirkpatrick polychrome sculpture series, for which he used a 3-D printer to create the metal and resin segments. The series title refers to the music of the Italian composer Domenico Scarlatti, known for his short but exuberant Baroque period harpsichord sonatas (he wrote more than 500 of them), and to Ralph Kirkpatrick, the American musicologist and harpsichordist, who brought Scarlatti's work to the attention of the listening public, and in 1953 produced the authoritative scholarly catalogue of the sonatas. Stella was inspired by the sonatas, and his series works, like the sonatas, are given "K" numbers, but they allude to Scarlatti's music abstractly with visual rhythm and movement, according to Stella, rather than literal correlation. Stella continued producing new works in the series into 2012. These were shown at the Freedman Art Gallery that year, and commenting about his work in the series, Stella said, "If you follow the edges of the lines, there's a sense of movement, and when they move well and the color follows, they become colorful, and that's what happens in the Scarlatti—it builds up and it moves...". Ron Labaco, a curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, showed Stella's work in an exhibition featuring computer-enabled pieces, Out of Hand: Materialising the Postdigital (2013-14).

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. It was created to replace the large (each ten feet wide by ten feet tall) diptych of his paintings, Laestrygonia I and Telepilus Laestrygonia II, that had been displayed in the lobby of the original World Trade Center, destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City.

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

On June 1, 2008, Stella, a member artist of the Artists Rights Society) published with ARS president Theodore Feder 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

He was 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".

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.

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.

From 1961 to 1969, Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael. At the time of his death, he was married to Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician. They had two sons, Patrick and Peter. He also had a daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages.

Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, on May 4, 2024, eight days before his 88th birthday.

• Julia M. Busch: A Decade of Sculpture: the 1960s, Associated University Presses, Plainsboro, 1974; ISBN 0-87982-007-1
• Frank Stella and Siri Engberg: Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997; ISBN 9780935640588
• Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Frank 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 and 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

• Frank Stella works at the National Gallery of Art
• Unbounded Doctrine: Encountering the Art-Making Career of Frank Stella ArtsEditor.com, December 29, 2015.
• Frank Stella: Saving abstraction Jane Kinsman, National Gallery of Australia, November 11, 2016
• Word Symbol Space An exhibition featuring work by Frank Stella at The Jewish Museum, NY.
• Frank Stella interviewed by Robert Ayers, March 2009
• Works of art, auction & sale results, exhibitions, and artist information for Frank Stella on artnet
• Guggenheim Museum online Biography of Frank Stella
• Stella mural installation, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
• Frank Stella Papers at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art
• 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