by Frank Stella, the American artist who has died aged 87, remained at the forefront of abstract art for over half a century; His work was seen as a trace of future developments from the moment he burst onto the New York art scene at the age of 23.
Stella began his career in the 1950s, producing works in the style of the Abstract Expressionists, but his breakthrough came after the first solo show of the American artist Jasper Johns, which was sold out at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York at the beginning of the year 1958.
He started working on a painting he called Delta, “and I remember being mad about it. So I painted over it, and went to sleep. When I looked at it the next day, it didn’t look so bad. I just simplified it by painting the bands black. But something was happening. There was a kind of presence. That was the beginning.”
Delta began the series of Black Paintings that earned Stella’s name and remain his most famous work – large, aggressive canvases covered in streaks of black enamel paint that created repetitive, rippling patterns. In 1959, four of the Black Paintings were included in the important exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, along with works by Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. Sombre and somber, with disturbing titles such as Reichstag and Arbeit Macht Frei, the pictures that threatened Manhattan. Stella was only 23. He had his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery the following year.
Over the next ten years Stella made series after series of abstract paintings. Stripes became a hallmark. He used them as the basis for complex geometric designs; They laid them on top of canvases that created unusual shapes and rendered them with flat house paints, rather than oil.
Those looking for “meaning” were told not to bother. The picture was the thing, he argued, dismissing the notion that art could be a vehicle for the expression of larger truths. “What you see is what you see,” he famously declared in 1964. As his friend, the sculptor Carl Andre, once wrote, “The strokes of the path are the brush on the canvas.” His purpose, Stella said, was to “keep the paint as good as it was in the can”.
Stella’s paintings did much to end the dominance of Abstract Expressionism and usher in Jesuitism – so much so that he was often called the “father” of Jesuitism. But from the late 1960s onwards Stella began to change from a minimalist concern with flatness and the suppression of illusions. His paintings became more complex in structure, color and shape. Later he took them off the wall, creating sculptural forms that were very loud, with titles that sought connections to external phenomena.
This change began with a memorable series of 44 asymmetrical canvases, the “Irregular Polygons”, in which Stella’s trademark stripes gave way to vast areas of vibrant color and the paintings took on an autobiographical flavor, named after towns in New Hampshire where the young Stella lived mix. he visited on fishing trips with his father.
These paintings secured Stella’s place at the forefront of the avant-garde, and eventually won him his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, when he was 33, making him the most he is young to be honored at MoMA in this way (almost). twenty years later, in 1987, he was the only living artist to have a second retrospective at the institute).
But his attitude changed completely in the 1970s and 1980s, when he developed a much freer and more widespread idiom that paved the way for the Neo-Expressionist and graffiti artists. His series “Brazil” and “Exotic Birds”, with their dense proliferation of floral forms, bright colors and surfaces covered with glitter, reflected the mood of the age which was all about turning back to the formal abstraction of the 1960s. It was anything but minimal.
Stella gave theoretical justification for this U-turn in 1983 when he was invited to give a series of Norton lectures on art at Harvard. To prepare for the lectures he decided to visit the old masters again and found himself translated by John the Baptist from Caravaggio: “Until then I was not able to relate to the old masters, because the time that is spent with Manet,” he said.
But Caravaggio’s work had a profound effect on him: “After seeing his work, I felt reaffirmed in every way about what I wanted to do. I want my paintings and the work I make to have that kind of presence. I want it to be ‘real’ in the way that a Caravaggio painting is real.”
In his lectures he offered a broad critique of the minimalist style he had done so much to promote. “The most valuable shallow surface painting of the last 15 years,” he declared, “was extremely dull and unpredictable”. In contrast, Caravaggio’s dramatic foreshortenings and crowded foregrounds suggested perspective and the expansion of action outside the picture into the viewer’s space. This was just what modern painting needed, he said.
His earlier work, which he later suggested – “all that cleverness and swagger” – was “a kind of hiding from the fact that somehow I wasn’t acceptable and my feelings weren’t that acceptable”. But his volte face didn’t seem to faze him: “There’s a power in the strip pictures that the newest ones will never have. On the other hand, there is an energy – a kind of florid excitement – in the newer works that the strip paintings lacked. I don’t think you can do it all at once. That’s why you’re lucky to have a lifetime.”
Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936 to a first-generation Sicilian immigrant, and grew up in Malden, a blue-collar suburb of Boston. His father, a gynecologist, sent him to Phillips Academy, Andover, where he earned a reputation for fearlessness (he once lost three front teeth in a dormitory scrap). As a child he never dreamed of being an artist: “My parents’ view was that artists were perhaps a little better than pimps.” But at Princeton University, where he studied history, he joined a night class in painting and drawing and discovered his calling.
After graduating in 1958 he moved to New York, where for a long time he shared a loft studio on West Broadway with Carl Andre and the photographer Hollis Frampton.
Stella’s paintings could fetch millions of dollars but he did not consider himself rich, partly because he had expensive tastes. He liked fast cars and bred racehorses as a hobby.
A man with thick, wavy hair and a high-pitched New Yorker voice (some may remember Joe Pesci in Goodfellas), Stella was known for being so fierce that his friends refused to play tennis with him. Gallery director Lawrence Rubin, who gave Stella his second solo show, in Paris in 1961, once said, “He doesn’t play for the fun of playing. He plays to win. And that’s how he plays art.”
In 2009 he received the National Medal of Arts from President Obama.
In 1961 Stella married the art historian Barbara Rose, with whom he had a daughter and a son. The marriage was dissolved in 1968. He married, secondly in 1978, Harriet McGurk, a paediatrician, with whom he had two sons.
Frank Stella, born 12 May 1936, died 4 May 2024
