Frank Stella, one of the most respected post-war Americans in the United States and one of the representatives of Minimalism.
Born in Maltese, Massachusetts in 1936, Stella entered the Phillips Academy to study art. During the college apprenticeship he learned from Op Art pioneer Joseph Albers and Hans Hofman, the pioneer of abstract expressionism, then went to Princeton University to major in history, where he met American abstraction artist Darby Bannard and art critic and art historian Michael Fried. During his college years, he often visited the works of the New York Gallery, where he was inspired by the works of abstract expressionist artists Jackson Pollock and Frank Kline, which influenced his later creative direction.
In the 1950s, he began to develop purely image works. The "Black Paintings" published in 1959 was the masterpiece of this period. The paintings are only painted with regular geometric black lines, which reveals Stella’s quote "a flat surface with paint on it-nothing", which which brings the spirit of Minimalism to maximum. This innovative aesthetic concept, which runs counter to the notion of drafting in traditional painting, allowed him to be recognized by the American art world before he was 25 years old. Since 1959 he has become a permanent cooperative artist of the famous American art dealer Leo Castelli.
In the 1960s, in addition to extending this concept to "Aluminum Paintings" and "Copper Paintings". The series uses a wider range of colors, and the shape of the canvas jumps from a traditional square or rectangle to a special irregular shape. In the mid-1960s he began to extend his art to printmaking and design stage costumes. In 1970, MoMA held a retrospective for him and he became the youngest artist in the retrospective of MoMA history.
In the next few decades, Stella developed the series"Maximalist" series, a painting with a sculptural character. He put the polygon's work on the plywood and added the collage elements to make the work look three-dimensional, and the size of the work he tried was getting bigger and bigger. In the 1990s, in addition to making freestanding sculptures for public spaces, he also reached out to the architectural project. The projects he had undertaken included a 1997 project of 5,000-square-foot installation "Stella Project" for the Rebecca and John J. Moores Music Hall in the University of Houston.
Stella's artistic journey has made extraordinary achievements. As a pioneer of Minimalism, his classic statement "What you see is what you see" has opened a door for the Minimalism, affecting countless artists. In 1984 he was invited to give six lectures at Harvard's famous "Charles Eliot Norton lectures". In 2006, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the former US President Barack Obama. In 2015, the Whitney Museum of American Art held a large retrospective exhibition for him. The NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale in South Florida also held a large-scale retrospective for him in 2017. His work has been collected by many important art institute, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Tate Gallery in London, the National Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Stella moved to New York in 1958. In 1961, he married the famous art critic Barbara Rose, but the relationship lasted only 8 years. In 1978, he entered the second marriage with Harriet McGurk, a pediatrician. The 83-year-old Stella is still active in the art world.
Figure 1：Frank Stella in the studio © Frank Stella
Figure 2 top left：Frank Stella, Abra Variation I, 1969, Fluorescent alkyd on canvas, 304.8 x 304.5 cm © The Museum of Modern Art
Figure 2 top right：Frank Stella, Black Star, 2014. Carbon fiber. 570 x 570 x 570 cm. Private collection. © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Nic Lehoux
Figure 2 bottom： Installation view of Frank Stella: A Retrospective (October 30, 2015—February 7, 2016). © 2015 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photograph by Ronald Amstutz
