Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter, sculptor and
printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of
minimalism and
post-painterly abstraction.[1] Stella lives and works in New York City.
Biography
Frank Stella was born in
Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. [2] His father was a
gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.[3]
In the 1970s he moved into
NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.[7] As of 2015, Stella lived in
Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his studio in
Rock Tavern, New York.[3]
Work
Late 1950s and early 1960s
Upon moving to New York City, he began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object.
Stella married
Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more". [citation needed]
Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from the first line of the
Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the
Nazi Party, and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization. [citation needed]
From 1960 his works used
shaped canvases later developing into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example. [citation needed]
Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which
arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. [citation needed]
Late 1960s and early 1970s
In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by
Merce Cunningham. [citation needed]
The
Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one.[8]
During the following decade, Stella introduced relief, which he came to call "maximalist" painting for its
sculptural qualities. [citation needed] After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (1973), his Minimalism became baroque. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by
BMW to paint a
BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the
BMW Art Car Project. He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas."[9]
From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to
Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.[11] To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created by assistants[11] (eg. La scienza della fiacca from 1984. [citation needed]
In 1993, he created the entire decorative scheme for
Toronto’s
Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot
mural. [citation needed] In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot Euphonia at the Moores Opera House at the
Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the
University of Houston, in Houston, TX.[12][13] A monumental sculpture titled Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, ein Shauspiel, 3x [D#8], 2001, was installed outside the
National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. [citation needed]
The titles for Stella's Scaralatti Sonata Kirkpatrick series were triggered by the harpsichord sonatas of
Domenico Scarlatti.[14]
By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures.[18] The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits.[18] His Jasper’s Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at
7 World Trade Center in 2021.[19]
Artists' rights
On June 6, 2008, Stella (with
Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society[20]) published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S.
Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located". [citation needed]
In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote,
The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search.
The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work...[21]
Stella's work was included in several exhibitions in the 1960s, among them the
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966).[22] The
Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a second retrospective of Stella's work in 1970.[11]
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "What You See Is What You See: Frank Stella and the Anderson Collection at SFMOMA," San Francisco, CA, June 11–September 6, 2004
Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums, "Frank Stella 1958," Cambridge, MA, February 4–May 7, 2006
Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture," New York, NY, May 1–July 19, 2007
Neue Nationalgalerie, "Stella & Calatrava. The Michael Kohlhass Curtain," Berlin, Germany, April 15–August 14, 2011
The Phillips Collection, "Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series," Washington, D.C., June 11 –September 4, 2011
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, "Frank Stella. The Retrospective. Works 1958-2012," Wolfsburg, Germany, September 8, 2012 – January 20, 2013
Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, "Inflated Star and Wood Star," London, UK, February 18–May 17, 2015
Stella gave the
Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.[29] These six talks were published by
Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.[30]
In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the
National Medal of Arts by President
Barack Obama.[31] In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the
International Sculpture Center. [citation needed] In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate from the
University of Jena in
Jena, (Germany), where his large sculptures of the "Hudson River Valley Series" are on permanent display, becoming the second artist to receive this honorary degree after
Auguste Rodin in 1906.[32]
Art market
In May 2019,
Christie's set an auction record for Stella's Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.[33]
In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/ascending Green Values (1977) was sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million with premium) in London. The painting was bought for $1.9 million in 2006 from the collection of Belgian art patrons Roger and Josette Vanthournout at Sotheby’s.[34]
Personal life
From 1961-1969 Stella was married to art historian
Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.[35] In 1978 he married pediatrician Harriet McGurk.[36]
Selected bibliography
Julia M. Busch: A decade of sculpture: the 1960s, Associated University Presses, Plainsboro, 1974;
ISBN0-87982-007-1
Frank Stella and
Siri Engberg: Frank Stella at Tyler Graphics, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1997;
ISBN9780935640588
Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: The Writings of Frank Stella. Die Schriften Frank Stellas, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001;
ISBN3-88375-487-0,
ISBN978-3-88375-487-1 (bilingual)
Frank Stella and Franz-Joachim Verspohl: Heinrich von Kleist by Frank Stella, Verlag der Buchhandlung König, Cologne, 2001;
ISBN3-88375-488-9,
ISBN978-3-88375-488-8 (bilingual)
Frank Stella 1958 poet
William Corbett writes about the exhibition titled Frank Stella 1958 at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts February 4 – May 7, 2006