Frank Stella, a leading figure in abstract art for the past 65 years, has died aged 87. Her death last May 4, at home in New York, was announced by the Marianne Boesky Gallery, which has represented Stella since 2014.
The gallery paid tribute to how Stella’s “extraordinary and constantly evolving work investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objectivity.” “It has been a great honor to work with Frank over this past decade,” said Marianne Boesky. “His is a remarkable legacy.”
Frank Stella made an instant name in 1959 with his stark monochrome stripes Black paints, before graduating to metallic tones and then bright colors, in a wide range of geometric configurations. In her first decade working in New York City, Stella presented her work in a series of landmark exhibitions at the city’s leading institutions, including Sixteen Americans (1959) at the Museum of Modern Art, Geometric abstraction (1962) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, The canvas in shape (1964) and Systemic painting (1966) at the Solomon T Guggenheim Museum, eo Color structure at the Whitney in 1971.
Protactor Series by Stellanamed after the geometry tool of the same name and launched at the Leo Castelli Gallery in 1967, consolidated its influence on abstract art in the 1960s and 1970s. Looking back on those years in 1999, when it had a sculpture show in Bernard Jacobson in London, Stella said: “I outlasted or outlived the dealers. [of the 1960s]. Larry Rubin is retired; Leo Castelli has disappeared. I actually grew up in a different generation and now they are gone. My world passed and disappeared. I’m out there nagging to keep going, but I don’t really fit into the tough world.”
Frank Stella poses with one of his works at the Kunstmuseum in Wolfsburg, Germany, during its 2012 retrospective Photographer: Matthias Leitze/Alamy Stock Photo
In the 1970s he devoted himself to making relief paintings that became more and more complex. “Relief paintings forced me to get out and get involved in the real world,” he said The Journal of Art in 1999. “I had to go out and buy felt and plywood and honeycomb aluminum and things like that. I started bringing things into my work, instead of working with things in the controlled conditions of the studio. Picasso came out quite a bit. , but, by our standards, one would say he didn’t go as far as he went with his materials.”
I feel like one of the good things about getting through it all is that it’s now up to everyone else
Frank Stella
Stella graduated to work in large-scale sculpture and architecture, collaborating with architects such as Richard Meier and Santiago Calatrava. In 1983-84 he gave Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University, called Work space (published under the same title by Harvard in 1985) in which he praised Baroque and other paintings for their poetic, as well as constructive, use of space and volume.
Stella was very direct when talking about her art. His much-referenced observation “what you see is what you see” was offered to art historian Bruce Glaser in 1964 for clarity about his early minimalist work. “That doesn’t leave much after, does it?” Glaser asked. “I don’t know what else there is,” Stella replied. talking with The Journal of Art half a century later, he remarked “I’ve said it many times: abstraction can be many things. It can, in a sense, tell a story, even if in the end it’s a pictorial story.”
Talking to Norbert Lynton for The Journal of Art in 1999, Stella reflected on the public perception of her work in the first 40 years of her career: “People say, ‘Why do you change?’ I don’t change much. Changes come from two things: one, being a little dissatisfied, the other, looking for something else. That’s great when it happens, but generally artists want to keep looking.”
By the time of his 2015 retrospective at the Whitney, he no longer carried the burden of minimalism he had assumed with his Black paints. “I think one of the good things about getting through it all is that now it’s up to everyone else,” he said. The Journal of Art.
Frank Philip Stella, born in Malden, Massachusetts on May 21, 1936; married 1961 Barbara Rose (deceased 2020; one son, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1969); partner of Shirley De Lemos Wyse (one daughter); married second Harriet E. McGurk (two children); died in New York on May 4, 2024.
Read more from Frank Stella in his own words The Journal of Art Archive.
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