Artist Frank Stella, who redirected the course of avant-garde art in the 1950s and 1960s with sparse, featureless but indelible abstract paintings, helping to usher in the style that came to be known as Minimalism, died Saturday at age 87.
In late 1958, at the age of 22, Stella began using a house painter's brush to apply matte black paint to canvases in simple configurations, one straight, parallel line after another, leaving only a faint white space between them. Like Jasper Johns's American flag paintings that Stella had seen, his “Black Paintings” seemed to exclude the grand gestures of the reigning Abstract Expressionists. “What you see is what you see,” he said of his work in a 1964 interview alongside fellow artists Donald Judd and Dan Flavin. The “Black Paintings” contain complicated contradictions. Their construction is indeed clearly evident, but they also have a smoky and ominous, even deadly, effect. Stella gave them titles like “Die Fahne hoch!” (“Raise the flag”, the anthem of the Nazi Party) and “Arundel Castle, the 11th century English landmark. They were shown in a legendary group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in late 1959, “16 Americans,” which also included Johns, Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly and other important artists.
Stella would soon become one of the most celebrated figures of her time. The Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of his work in 1970 and another in 1987. The Whitney Museum did the same in 2015. In 1964, still 30 years old, he was among the artists who represented the United States at the Venice Biennale. The list of his solo exhibitions on his official CV is more than seven pages long. In 2009, President Barack Obama awarded him the National Medal of Arts, praising “his sophisticated visual experiments – often transcending the boundaries between painting, printmaking and sculpture.”
Throughout a career that spanned more than 65 years, Stella was seemingly indefatigable, always in search of new visual splendour, and infuriated some parts of the art world with her multifaceted efforts, while leaving behind her previous restraint. Speaking at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 1960, at the age of 24, he explained what would become his life's mission. “There are two problems with painting,” he said. “One is to discover what painting is and the other is to discover how to make a painting.”
Frank Philip Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts on May 12, 1936. He began making his own paintings at age 14. After high school at the prestigious Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was a classmate, Stella enrolled at Princeton University, studying history while painting. His teachers included art historian William Seitz and painter Stephen Greene. After graduation in 1958, he moved to New York, settling on the Lower East Side.
Stella's first series seem to unfold steadily, one after another, with a pre-ordained logic, unspoken rules producing flat, symmetrical and repetitive paintings. The “Black Paintings” gave rise to “Copper” and “Aluminum” paintings, some made on unusually shaped canvases. Next came the concentric squares in a panoply of colors and large works from “Protractor” (1967–71) with curved edges, intertwined lines and neon tones.
These works are completely extroverted and confident, yet controlled – all with clean lines and sharp edges.
In the early 1970s, Stella adopted increasingly unusual shapes and color palettes, such as the “Polish Village” series, which has relief elements that project into space. They were inspired by photographs he saw of wooden synagogues that were destroyed by the Nazis. “Synagogue carpentry is incredibly sophisticated on a formal level,” he told Artforum in 2016. “The interconnection – the complex geometric connection of each part of the building, which is visible in the photographs – really attracted me.”
And then, in the mid-1970s, Stella said goodbye to her rational structures, plunging decisively into new and idiosyncratic approaches. Swirls, nets, and colorful squiggles replace solid planes; elements begin to protrude from the screens in all directions. Works hanging on the wall evolved into fantastic sculptures.
Conceptual modes were in vogue at the time and influential academics declared the end of painting. Stella's unorthodoxy exasperated them. Writing in 1981 in “October” magazine, Douglas Crimp declared that the artist’s “paintings of the late 1970s are truly hysterical in their challenge to black paintings; each one seems to throw a tantrum, shouting and spitting that the end of the painting has not yet come.”
Gloriously eccentric Stellas now fill the lobbies of corporate office buildings (some of the only places that can accommodate his greatest works), such as 599 Lexington Avenue and the recently opened 50 Hudson Yards in Manhattan. Freestanding sculptures, some produced with the aid of computer technology, dot sculpture gardens and public squares, including the one in front of 7 World Trade Center.
Stella was often asked by interviewers about negative opinions about his later work, but he generally had the same general response. When I visited him in his sculpture studio in upstate New York in 2015, he ignored these criticisms and was indifferent even to his upcoming Whitney research. “I’m working and exhibiting all the time – just like most artists,” he said, smoking a Cuban cigar (a passion he learned from critic Clement Greenberg).
An exhibition of Stella's enormous new works – wild, free-form fiberglass forms in an explosive array of colors, carefully perched on wheeled stands – will be on display at Jeffrey Deitch in New York until May 14.
In a 2000 interview with “Bomb,” Saul Ostrow asked Stella about the desire so many people have expressed over the years that he return to his minimal, predictable language. “The whole idea of art is to be open,” the artist responded, “to be generous, to absorb the viewer and absorb yourself, to let them in on it.”
Source: Artnet News