Stella, Frank (1936-2024), was an American artist famous for his abstract paintings. Stella was one of the first painters and theorists of the Minimalist art movement during the 1960’s.
Stella first gained recognition with a series of pictures called the Black Paintings (1959-1960). The pictures were square or rectangular in shape, and they were composed of rows of stripes that made designs on the canvas. Each stripe or band was the same width as all the others. Stella wanted to dispense with the pictorial drama and complex compositions of the Abstract Expressionist movement that had been popular since the mid-1940’s. Stella stated, “What you see is what you see,” meaning that there was nothing more to be understood from a painting than its obvious pattern and color.
During the 1960’s, Stella experimented with bands of stripes on increasingly complex, geometrically shaped canvases, such as L shapes, pentagons, semicircles, and parallelograms. The Black Paintings and the geometrically shaped canvases were painted with commercial house paint. Later in the 1960’s, Stella used fluorescent Day-Glo paint. He again was reacting against the complexity of previous abstract painting by creating work that was simpler, more direct, and more logical as the eye moved from one stripe to the next.
During the 1970’s, Stella’s paintings changed radically. His work shifted from the carefully painted stripes and geometric shapes of Minimalism. He created three-dimensional sculptures in space, with large planes of industrial metals and fiberglass jutting away from the wall. Stella continued these metallic reliefs into the 2000’s.
Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936, in Malden, Massachusetts. He received a B.A. degree from Princeton University in 1958. A series of his lectures on abstract art was published as Working Space (1986). Stella died on May 4, 2024.
