Frank Stella

Frank Stella – Early inspiration from Jasper Johns, Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko

Frank Stella was born on 12 May 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. He attended the Philips Academy High School in Andover from 1950 to 1954 where he met the film maker Hollis Frampton and the minimalism-oriented sculptor Carl Andre and from 1954 to 1958 studied history at Princeton University in New Jersey. Alongside this, he took painting lessons from Stephen Greene and William C Seitz and became acquainted with the sculptor, painter and graphic artist Jasper Johns. Johns shaped Stella with his Target Paintings, whilst other early role models and influences took the form of the colour fields of Barnett Newman and the art of Mark Rothko. Stella distanced himself from the abstract expressionism and action painting of Franz Klein or Jackson Pollock in favour of a more moderate, rather meditative pictorial language. He graduated from the university in 1958 with a Bachelor of Art and then moved to New York, marrying the art critic Barbara Rose in 1961. They had a daughter, whose godfather was the art professor Michael Fried. The marriage dissolved in 1969.

Support from Leo Castelli; combination of sculpture and painting

Not long after graduating, Frank Stella attracted much public attention in 1958 when he used National Socialist slogans in his so-called Black Paintings and gave them provocative names such as Arbeit macht frei and Die Fahne hoch! Despite the criticism, Stella won the interest of the gallerist Leo Castelli who enabled the young artist’s first solo exhibition in 1960. That same year, Stella began experimenting with freely shaped canvases on which he arranged coloured lines. He called these Shaped Canvases because he overcame the classical rectangular shape of the canvas and enriched the two-dimensional painting with a third spatial dimension using copper and aluminium. This merging of picture and sculpture was pioneering and made Frank Stella to co-founder of a new perception of art. With works such as Sunset Beach consisting of spectrally arranged colour fields, he approached the pictorial language of his older colleague Kenneth Noland. 

Active exhibition participation; closeness to Heinrich Kleist

Frank Stella took part in documenta 4 and 6, was a guest at the Venice Biennale and had a retrospective in the world-famous Museum of Modern Art, as well as designing stage settings in conjunction with Merce Cunningham. By this time, he did not shy away from the use of modern technology and had his designs scanned into computers and printed three-dimensionally. Many works are inspired by the literary creativity of Heinrich Kleist such as Der Michael Kohlhaas-Vorhang: Stella first met Kleist in college and saw in him a great, crazy spirit to which he felt connected. Frank Stella has received prizes and awards for his work and in 2009 he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the former US president Barack Obama. More recently, he has created numerous sculptures for public spaces: his art no longer serves as representation but becomes an object itself.

Frank Stella lives and works in New York.