Frank Stella

Biography

Black enamel from the hardware store, a house-painter's brush, stripes of equal width at equal intervals, bare canvas between them and the pencilled guidelines. That is how, in late 1958, the twenty-two-year-old Frank Stella painted his “Black Paintings”. One of them, “Die Fahne Hoch!” (1959), is named after the first line of the Nazi anthem and, according to the artist, repeats the proportions of their flags.

The critics, as people later recalled, were outraged. A year later these canvases were hanging at MoMA.

Stella was born on 12 May 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, the eldest of three children; all four grandparents had come from Sicily at the turn of the century. His father, a gynaecologist, had painted houses as a student to pay for his training, and took his son along as a helper: first sanding the floor, then the brush. At Phillips Academy in Andover Stella was taught painting by the abstractionist Patrick Morgan, while Carl Andre was in the class above, though by Andre's account the two never actually met there; from books he took Albers and Hofmann. At Princeton he majored in history, played lacrosse and wrestled, and the painter Stephen Greene and the art historian William Seitz took him round the New York galleries to see Pollock and Kline. In 1958, on graduating, he moved to New York, shared a studio with Hollis Frampton and Andre, and earned his living painting houses.

Recognition came before he was twenty-five. In 1959 his paintings were shown in “Three Young Americans” at Oberlin, and in December four black pinstripe paintings went into “Sixteen Americans” at the Museum of Modern Art, alongside Johns, Rauschenberg, Kelly and Nevelson. His first show at Leo Castelli's in 1960 sold almost nothing. A painting, he said, is “a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more”; in a 1964 radio broadcast with Judd and Flavin he summed up: “What you see is what you see,” and the phrase became, in a newspaper's words, the unofficial motto of Minimalism. From 1960 he painted in aluminium and copper paint and began cutting canvases in the shape of the letters L, N, U and T; in 1966–1967 came the “Irregular Polygons”, and in 1967 the “Protractor” series (continued to 1971): arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders, named after the circular-plan cities of the Middle East he had visited in the early sixties. In 1967 he designed the set and costumes for Merce Cunningham's “Scramble”; from the mid-sixties he worked with the printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L., and in 1969 he drew the emblem for the Metropolitan Museum's centennial. In 1970 MoMA staged his retrospective, making him the youngest artist the museum had so honoured; the same year he and other Americans withdrew their work from the Venice Biennale in protest against the war in Vietnam and Cambodia.

In the seventies the picture climbed off the wall. The “Polish Village” series (1970–1973) is made in high relief, of wood and other materials, after photographs and drawings of the wooden synagogues of eastern Poland burned down by the Nazis, from Maria and Kazimierz Piechotka's book of 1959. Stella called this kind of painting maximalist. Flat planes gave way to squiggles, lattices and swirls, parts stuck out of the canvas in all directions, and wall pieces turned into sculptures. In 1976 BMW commissioned him to paint a 3.0 CSL racing coupé: he laid graph paper over the car, “theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas”. From 1978 to 2005 his studio was the former Van Tassell and Kearney horse auction building in the East Village; in 2012 the house was designated a New York City landmark. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s he made a large series after Melville's “Moby-Dick”: the relief grew ever deeper until it became free-standing sculpture of cones, pillars, waves and French curves, enlarged from his collages and models by assistants, industrial cutters and the computer. In 1984 he gave the Norton Lectures at Harvard, published in 1986 as “Working Space”: abstraction, he argued, should win back the depth of Baroque painting.

Critics wrote that his Minimalism had turned Baroque.

In 1993 he painted for the Princess of Wales Theatre in Toronto the dome, the proscenium arch and the rear wall, almost a thousand square metres; in 1997 he installed “Euphonia” at the opera house of the University of Houston; his “Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X” stands in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1996 the University of Jena gave him an honorary doctorate, the second in its history after Rodin in 1906; his sculptures of the “Hudson River Valley” series are on permanent display there. From 2006 he made the “Scarlatti K” series: painted sculptures of metal and resin made on a 3D printer, numbered like the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti in Ralph Kirkpatrick's catalogue and, in his words, conveying the music through rhythm rather than literally. In the 2010s the computer became his brush, and out of it came stars of solid planes or wire mesh. “Jasper's Split Star” (2017) was installed in 2021 in the lobby of 7 World Trade Center, in place of his diptych lost on 11 September 2001. He received the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the lifetime achievement award for sculpture in 2011; in 2015–2016 the Whitney Museum and the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth held his retrospective. The studio of his last years was at Rock Tavern in the Hudson Valley: a hangar that, as a visiting journalist noted, was easier to cross by golf cart than on foot. It seems to me he would have preferred to be judged by that hangar rather than by the black stripes. Stella died on 4 May 2024 at his home in the West Village, eight days before his eighty-eighth birthday.