by In February 2015, a pair of giant stars, one in polished aluminum and the other in unvarnished teak, appeared in the courtyard of the Royal Academy in London. These were made by the American artist and Academy emeritus Frank Stella, who has died aged 87.
For all their differences, the two stars were part of a single work called, with deadpan literalness, the Inflated Star and the Wooden Star. Considering their size – each 7 meters in all dimensions – it seemed unlikely that they had anything to hide. In 1966, digging into the mystical air of abstract expressionism, Stella famously said: “What you see is what you see.”
It became a battle cry for a then-emerging style known as minimalism – and it also seemed to fit Inflated Star and Wooden Star to a T.
And yet Stella’s work raised far more questions than it answered. Its stars were welded together by a tubular metal armature, as they were in their title. They seemed to be orbiting each other, although they had a gravitational pull that couldn’t be told.
Visually, they were very different from each other. Star was puffy and cushiony, polished to Jeff Koonsy’s high gloss; Wooden Star looked austere and skeletal. One could not be read without reference to the other, and yet the frame of that reference – before / after, older / newer, stronger / weaker – was left entirely up to the viewer.
Beyond this again was the issue of portfolios. Both sets of Stella’s grandparents came to the US as Sicilian immigrants in the early 20th century. His parents, Frank Sr., a gynecologist, and Constance (nee Santonelli), an artist turned housewife, spoke Italian to each other at home. Stella is Italian for “star”.
Stella’s involvement with the star form began early, and in two dimensions. By 1963, while in residency at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, he was painting star-shaped canvases, such as Port Tampa City. These were joined by prints such as the 1967 Star of Persia series. In one form or another, hundreds of Stella’s stars can be found in galleries, plazas and sculpture parks around the world. He was still certain that the form was not a nominal calling card, and he pointed out that he was the only person he knew who did not possess Stella’s star himself.
Fame soon came to him. Stella, the eldest of three children, was born in Malden, a wealthy suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, and her ambitious parents sent her to Phillips Academy, Andover, the equivalent of Eton and local alma mater to both Presidents Bush. The art lessons he had there were the only ones he would get. After graduating with a BA in history from Princeton in 1958, he moved to New York, where he rented a loft on West Broadway and earned his keep as a house painter.
His father trained him in this regard, and despite the fact that he was working a 60-hour week, he insisted that he do painting jobs around the house with the help of his son. Stella’s early Copper Paintings (1961) used the barn repellent gun with which he had removed his father’s sloop the previous summer. Another series, launched the same year, was named Benjamin Moore after the famous brand of house paint in which they were made. Andy Warhol bought a whole series of the works from scratch, starting his own Campbell’s Soup series shortly after.
Stella was no pop artist, however. He used household paints and brushes not to satirize popular culture but because they knew it. “The first time I saw Pollock,” he said in an interview with the NPR radio network in 2000, “I knew immediately how it was made.”
The black paintings he began in 1959 are still among his most famous canvases such as Die Fahne Hoch!, in the Whitney Museum of American Art, powerful in part because of the dance of darkness. Constructed of parallel bands of black house enamel separated by narrow strips of raw canvas, they are commonly known as “pinstripe” paintings; a method used by Stella into the 1970s. These early works were such an immediate success that their 23-year-old maker was included in the Sixteen Americans show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1959, along with Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly. In 1970, at 33, he became the youngest artist ever to be awarded a MoMA retrospective.
Stella’s early insistence that painting was “a flat surface with paint on it – nothing else” seemed reductive, but it gave him a set of rules to contend with. An early way around the self-imposed intensifications of his own form of minimalism was the production of shaped canvases – stars, and so-called “notched” paintings such as Newstead Abbey (1960), in which nicks cut from all four sides. A vertical canvas generates a rhythm of lines that suggest a rhombus in the middle. The feeling is that of a flattened ziggurat, as Stella’s two-dimensional work could become three-dimensional at any moment.
That was, more or less, what happened in the mid-80s. In the following ten years, Stella produced works such as La Scienza della Fiacca (4x) (1984) which responded in a broad way to the novel Moby Dick. As the black paintings and picture pins worked with and against their own steady flatness, Stella’s paintings of the 80s and 90s suddenly broke free from the wall, bursting forth in curls and curls of molded fiberglass and aluminum, often speckled with paint. (“They are surfaces to be painted on,” he said of the new works at the time. “So it’s still about painting.”) It was a short step from that to sculptures like the stars that were seen in the city yard. Burlington House in 2015.
If this seemed like a shift from minimalism to maximization, the shift itself was part of Stella’s story. Also in the mid 80’s, the cigar smear artist was very interested in the idea of turning smoke rings into a sculpture.
In the next 20 years, these slowly morphed, like smoke rings, into works with names like Atalanta and Hippomenes (2017), some wall-based and some made for the floor. Like his stars, Stella seemed intent on seeing how far he could push representation before disappearing into a vat of abstraction.
The change also meant that his work was moving back and forth between media, dimensions and years. When the World Trade Center was demolished in September 2001, the large diptych paintings by Stella that hung in the lobby of one of the buildings went with it. In 2021, Jasper’s Split Star statue, named after his friend Johns, replaced them in the reconstructed WTC plaza. This was a completely new work and one that went back 60 years, to the painting Jasper’s Dilemma (1962-63).
By the 21st century, Stella was one of the undisputed grand old men of American art. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts. In 2023, Delta, one of his earliest black paintings, went up for sale at Art Basel Miami with a price tag of $45m.
Stella married the art historian and critic Barbara Rose in 1961. They had two children, Rachel and Michael, and divorced in 1969. He had a daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse. With pediatrician Harriet McGurk, whom he married in 1973, Stella had two sons, Peter and Patrick. She and all five children survive, and he has five children.
• Frank Philip Stella, artist, born 12 May 1936; died 4 May 2024
