Frank Stella

Frank Stella 1936-, American artist, b. Malden, Mass. In his early "black paintings" Stella exhibits the precision and rationality that characterized minimalism , employing parallel angular stripes to emphasize the rectangular shape of his large canvases. His innovative and influential use of irregularly shaped canvases first appeared in his metallic series in 1960. Later examples of his work stress color in decorative curved motifs. In the 1970s and 80s, Stella abandoned the studied, minimalist aesthetic in favor of a more improvised, dynamic, and dramatic idiom in mixed-media. During that time he abandoned flat paintings and instead created large, jutting, multipart, three-dimensional painting-constructions that often incorporate bright colors, enlarged versions of French curves, and lively brushstroke patterns.

Stella's work became fully three-dimensional in the early 1990s in a series of dense abstract sculptures composed of found and cast elements in stainless steel and bronze. These unpainted and often large-scale metal wall constructions, with their tangled, layered, and looping shapes, project an air of vibrant spontaneity. One of his most important and monumental sculptures is Prince of Homburg (1995-2001), installed outside the National Gallery of Art's East Building, Washington, D.C. Throughout his career, Stella also has been a prolific printmaker. The Whitney Museum, New York City, has several of his paintings, and his works are included in numerous museum and corporate collections worldwide.

Bibliography: See Frank Stella: An Illustrated Biography (1996) by S. Guberman; studies by W. Rubin (1980), L. Rubin, ed. (1986), and A. Pacquement (1988).

Stella, Frank (1936– ). American painter, printmaker, and writer on art, a leading figure of Post-Painterly Abstraction. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, and began to paint abstract pictures while he was at school at Phillips Academy, Andover. In 1954–8 he studied history at Princeton University and also attended painting classes. At this time he was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, but after settling in New York in 1958 he was impressed by the flag and target paintings of Jasper Johns and the direction of his art changed completely. He began to emphasize the idea that a painting is a physical object rather than a metaphor for something else, saying that he wanted to ‘eliminate illusionistic space’ and that a picture was ‘a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more'. These aims were first given expression in a series of black ‘pinstripe’ paintings in which regular black stripes were separated by very thin lines. They made a big impact when four of them were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's ‘16 Americans’ exhibition in 1959, inspiring a mixture of praise and revulsion. Soon after this he began using flat bands of bright colour (Hyena Stomp, Tate Gallery, London, 1962), then to identify the patterning more completely with the shape of the picture as a whole he started working with notched and shaped canvases. In the 1970s he began to experiment with paintings that included cut-out shapes in relief and he abandoned his impersonal handling for a spontaneous, almost graffiti-like manner (Guadalupe Island, Caracara, Tate Gallery, London, 1979).

Stella has been an influential figure not only in painting but also on the development of Minimal sculpture (his friends have included Andre and Judd). In 1983–4 he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, which were published in 1986 as Working Space. John Golding writes of this book: ‘The Working Space of the title is Stella's plea for the reintroduction of greater spatial expansiveness, expressiveness and experiment into contemporary art: “What painting wants more than anything else is working space—space to grow into and expand into.” He feels—knows, indeed—that abstraction is the real, the great art of our time, but he is appalled by the dullness and flatness which he sees as characterizing so much abstract painting of recent years and which he finds shallow in every sense of the word: too “close-valued”, too conservative, too introverted, too much conditioned by technique’ (‘Frank Stella's Working Space’ in Visions of the Modern, 1994).

Stella, Frank (b Malden, Mass., 12 May 1936). American painter, a leading figure of Post-Painterly Abstraction. In his early work he was influenced by Abstract Expressionism, but after settling in New York in 1958 he was impressed by the flag and target paintings of Jasper Johns and the direction of his art changed completely. He began to emphasize the idea that a painting is a physical object rather than a metaphor for something else, saying that he wanted to ‘eliminate illusionistic space’ and that a picture was ‘a flat surface with paint on it—nothing more’. These aims were first given expression in a series of black ‘pinstripe’ paintings in which regular black stripes were separated by very thin lines. They made a big impact when four of them were shown at the Museum of Modern Art's ‘16 Americans’ exhibition in 1959, inspiring a mixture of praise and revulsion. Soon after this he began using flat bands of bright colour (Hyena Stomp, 1962, Tate, London), then—to identify the patterning more completely with the shape of the picture as a whole—he started working with notched and shaped canvases. In the 1970s he began to experiment with paintings that included cut-out shapes in relief and he abandoned his impersonal handling for a spontaneous, almost graffiti-like manner (Guadalupe Island, Caracara, 1979, Tate). He has been an influential figure, not only in painting but also on the development of Minimal sculpture (his friends have included Carl Andre and Donald Judd).