Frank Stella

Frank Stella (b. 1936) was born in Malden, Massachusetts. He attended Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, where he studied painting, and was graduated from Princeton with a degree in history. He is an avid squash player, loves auto racing and owns a horse farm in New York.

Stella has consistently explored new expressions of formal abstraction since he arrived on the New York art scene in 1959. First his black paintings and shaped canvases, then monumental geometric constructions known as the Protractor series, followed by several decades of works that challenge the distinction between painting and sculpture. During the 1970s, Stella's art evolved to include mixed-media reliefs and metal works with three-dimensionality suggestive of relief sculpture. In the mid-1970s, Stella became convinced that,

"abstract painting, for its own survival, would have to take practical lessons from old masters like Rubens and Caravaggio; it must find an 'independent pictorial space to establish its ties with the everyday space of perceived reality.' This ran counter to the whole argument of American formalism--and of the movement with which his [Stella's] early black, aluminum and copper stipes had been associated, minimalism--which strove to isolate the space of pictures from that of the real world." (Robert Hughes, Time [November 1987]).

Stella had his first retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970, and a second in 1987--one of the very few American artists to be accorded such an honor in his lifetime.

Sources:

Garfield, Donald. "Frank Stella." Museum News (September/October 1993).

Hughes, Robert. "The Grand Maximalist." Time (November 1987).

Kuspit, Donald. "Frank Stella." Artforum 26 (December 1987).

Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery archives.

© Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery and Sculpture Garden

http://sheldon.unl.eduLast Modified: 23 February 2000.