The artist who never stopped innovating
The father of minimalism, Frank Stella was the great shape-shifter of American modern art. In the late 1950s, the legendary artist was part of a vanguard that made a clean break from the messy gestures of abstract expressionism— in his case, starting with stark, chillingly precise all-black paintings. Over the next few decades, he would take more formal risks, with sunbursts of color and the first asymmetrically shaped canvases in contemporary art, his “Irregular Polygons” series. But anyone who searched for meaning in these hard-edged works would come up empty, which was just how Stella liked it. “If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would just be able to look at it,” he said in 1966. “What you see is what you see.”
“Fame came to him early,” said The Guardian (U.K.). Born in an affluent Boston suburb to a Sicilian-American gynecologist and a homemaker, Stella moved swiftly from the exclusive Phillips Academy–Andover, where he was taught by abstract painter Patrick Morgan, to Princeton University and then to the New York arts scene. His pinstriped “Black Paintings” earned him inclusion in the epoch-defining 1959-60 exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art when he was just
23, allotting him space alongside such luminaries as Jasper Johns and Ellsworth Kelly. Stella was a “restless, relentless innovator,” said The New York Times. In the 1970s and ’80s he “abandoned the flat picture plane, pushing his works away from the wall in assemblages bristling with painted aluminum curlicues,” while in the ’90s he moved into large-scale sculpture. Through it all, he enjoyed popular “adulation and stupendous commercial success,” including dozens of solo shows and retrospectives. In 2021, he installed his stainless-steel Jasper’s Split Star in the plaza of the rebuilt 7 World Trade Center, replacing two paintings that were destroyed on 9/11.
Though Stella’s works could sell for up to $28 million, “the critics weren’t always smitten,” said
The Washington Post. The New Yorker’s Harold Rosenberg found himself unmoved by Stella’s “chessboard aesthetic”; others disapproved of how often his massive but morally unchallenging works graced corporate lobbies. But he refused to explain himself to them—or anyone. “The one thing I learned is not to say anything about my own paintings,” he said in 2014. Otherwise, “you’ll never stop hearing what you said. It will come back to you again and again.”