Remembering Frank Stella, one of the leading abstract artists of his generation

“When you start looking at what you’re looking at, you can go anywhere,” American artist Frank Stella liked to say. Stella has looked closely at so many places over a seven-decade career. He remade Supremacist forms into stark abstractions in the early 1960s, before reinventing himself as a sculptor of terrifying architectural and tactile works that resisted easily defined categories. He leaves behind a remarkable body of work that, in the words of critic Peter Schjeldahl, “lives on as a residual pressure, as hard as nails, on the minds of those who have cared, or will care, about the art” of the latter half. – century

Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to first-generation Italian-American parents; his father was a doctor who sent him to boarding school, Phillips Academy in Andover, before taking a place at Princeton, where he majored in medieval history. Having never formally studied visual arts, Stella, with her bookish demeanor, charming disposition, and love of all things fast (cars, horses, squash), was always an outsider the inmates clamored to invite. He died as one of the most beloved. and the most collected of the great beasts of American abstraction.

If the Abstract Expressionists spent their time working in downtown five-cent diners in the Great Depression, Stella was part of a new generation of abstract artists, alongside Donald Judd and Carl Andre. (Stella liked an apocryphal story about Franz Kline, who answered the question about what a good artist did: “You know, it’s easy, you take them off the stools here in the bars and lift the drain grate out there” and throw them down the drain and then you put the grid on top… whoever crawls in first is the best artist.”) This new group was mostly college educated and knew what was what, but most importantly they got lucky. (or the good sense) to become fashion artists in a booming economy.

But it wasn’t plain sailing from the start. Stella was clear about wanting to be a New York artist and, as she said in her last interview, with art historian Megan Kincaid in Gagosian Quarterlyhe “wanted to try to see if I could keep myself [because it was in New York that all the art] what you were interested in or what you cared about was being made … and they were all New York artists, there was just no doubt about it.”

Having briefly worked as a penniless house painter out of college, Stella was quick to make her impact on the New York art scene. He was only 23 years old when he performed as part of Dorothy C. Miller’s major 16 Americans exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1959, alongside Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Ellsworth Kelly and Louise Nevelson, each of whom became friends and compatriots in arms. Miller had visited Stella’s studio earlier that summer, and by then had already produced the first version of The marriage of reason and miseryto be part of an austere and monochromatic series called The black paintings (1958-60). He did a second iteration specifically for the exhibition altering the composition slightly but significantly. Stella worked freehand on the large-scale canvas to construct extraordinary geometric stripes formed from densely applied black enamel paint, each line the width of a house painter’s brush, to produce it.

Paintings on painting

In her early career, Stella made paintings on paint; despite their grandiose titles, these were not works about philosophy or literature (or not yet) but about the simple process of applying paint to canvas. As Andre says in the catalog accompanying the MoMA show: “Frank Stella is not interested in expression or sensitivity. He is interested in the needs of painting… His lines are the paths of the brush on the canvas. These paths lead only to painting.” However, Stella’s self-referential paintings were born of trial and error; he was obsessive about the kind of paintings he wanted to make, never slapdash. “While working [Delta (1958), the first Black Painting]something wasn’t working and I painted it all black,” he later said, “[and so] the next day, when I looked at it, it seemed to have a kind of quality to it, being all black, although there was a lot of color and things showing between the bands, but the kind of darkness, the blackness and the repetition of the bands seemed to work” And the work they did: The black paintings they were an immediate success and solidified Stella’s status as a new master of abstraction, who used mathematics and geometry rather than overflowing with expression to achieve their effect.

Stella married the art historian and critic Barbara Rose in 1961 in London and they were the undisputed couple of minimalism until 1969, when they divorced. In 1965, Rose published the important “ABC Art” in Art in America, in which he laid out the fundamental characteristics of minimalist aesthetics, and the two were intellectual collaborators if not compatible partners. “[Stella had] no real desire to see my tears or hear my story,” Rose wrote privately in 1965, as the relationship went south. Stella later married Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician.

Throughout her career, Stella worked in groups of paintings and very rarely produced single works that had no conceptual, formal or thematic relationship with others. He lived by his famous axiomatic statement about the nature of his art, which became a defining minimalist slogan: “What you see is what you see.” (There’s a nice implicit change from the expected “what you see is what you get” truism; there’s no transaction in Stella’s world, just the pleasure of viewing, which is enough).

During the 1960s and 70s, he worked through what he called “a fairly formalized programmatic type.”[s] of color”, which changed slightly in pattern and composition. his Irregular polygons (1965-66) are gigantic, asymmetrical canvases, composed of simply painted bands and hard-edged shapes, and executed in a small range of flat colors. These are minimal but bold and exciting paintings that ended the centuries-old convention of the rectangular painting strung together on an easel. The world isn’t organized into four sides and right angles, so why should painting be? O transporter the series (1967-71) was named after the common measuring instrument, and went for semicircles, curved squares, and hard corners to revel in the relationship between line and color, while the Concentric squares e Labyrinths with miters works (1972-73) manage to build complex effects with simple compositions.

Acknowledgment of MoMA

Amazingly in 1970, just 11 years after Stella’s display 16 Americans, MoMA honored him with the first of two large-scale retrospectives (the second was in 1987). Stella had a knack for being in the right place at the right time. His stark abstractions seemed to follow the teleology of then-dominant painting as he moved relentlessly toward the flat, which was relentlessly promoted by MoMA’s Clement Greenberg-inspired curators in the 1970s. Although Stella recognized the utility of going along with such grandiose claims but cold about the history of art, it was the history of people and places that interested him most. That same year, Stella’s friend Richard Meier, the architect and designer who made prominent use of the color white, gave her a copy of the 1959 book. Wooden synagogues by María and Kazimierz Piechotka, experts in Jewish architecture who had been insurgents in the Warsaw uprising of 1944. The book depicted extraordinarily fine wooden buildings assembled in interlocking formations that had been lost during World War II and the Holocaust; the photographs captivated Stella, as did the fact that the destruction of the synagogues followed the coordinates of the European centers of abstraction, from Berlin to Warsaw and Moscow. Although Stella was born into a Catholic family, and not Jewish like Meier and the Piechotkas, he was so moved by the history of these lost places of worship that he set about making Polish Village Series (1971-73). The series comprised more than 100 abstract works inspired by carpentry and synagogue design, each with unique canvas dimensions and the name of a town (e.g. Lanckorona e Odelsk), which has become one of his most celebrated achievements, not least because they relate so poignantly to the world of loss and anguish outside of painting.

Stella often took on impossible projects, even Sisyphus. Once, when his son Michael was captivated by seeing a whale in an aquarium, Michael begrudgingly told his father that he didn’t have to do a paper on Moby Dick. That only encouraged him. This series was a stunning undertaking, occupying Stella for 12 years between 1985 and 1997, as she produced 226 works dedicated to each of the 135 chapters of the epic novel. The Grand Armada (IRS-6, 1X) (1989) is a large painted aluminum relief that resembles the fierce battle in the waves between Ishmael’s ship. pequod and their harpoons, and the determined whales that refuse to be caught. Stella gravitated to making large-scale sculptures like this: her “maximalists,” a play on words about “minimalism” and critics’ endless desire for categorization. They often looked as if the sculptor David Smith had welded together bits and pieces of a landfill and fused them in such a way that it seemed impossible for them to stand on their own. Stella’s “Maximalists” were notoriously difficult to display in museums and were often commissioned for public spaces.

In 2021, Stella made a monumental aluminum tribute to her friend Jasper Johns at 7 World Trade Center in New York, titled Jasper’s Split Star, which looks like an extraterrestrial object that fell from the sky in a sci-fi dystopia. He often included oblique references in his sculptures, from stars to smoke rings to hotels, but always with a deft touch. Stella never stopped looking at what she was looking at; It will take the rest of us more than a lifetime to fully appreciate all the places he’s been.

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