10 things to know about Frank Stella

1. Frank Stella is a rule-breaker

One of the most highly regarded American painters of the post-war era, Stella constantly evolved his style. The controlled minimalism of his works in the late 1950s and early ’60s gave way to maximalist riots of colour later in his career — with subsequent works surpassing the 2D canvas to become sculptural. His approach to materials was just as revolutionary, comprising house and car paint, cast aluminium, fibreglass and the latest 3D-printing techniques.

2. He first picked up a brush to paint houses

Stella was born to first-generation Sicilians in the small town of Malden, Massachusetts. His father was a gynaecologist, while his mother was interested in art, attending fashion school and painting landscapes. His father worked 60-hour weeks and insisted his son study hard and learn the importance of manual labour. Stella’s first experience with painting was re-coating houses and boats on his father’s orders.

When he moved to New York City, Stella was still painting houses to pay rent and continued to use the house painter’s brush and enamel when making his Black Paintings (1958-60). 

3. New York became his adopted home

When he graduated from Princeton University in 1958, Stella moved to the city, later reflecting: ‘I came here because it was the place where you could see art that I was interested in — it’s as simple as that’. In New York he encountered the work of Abstract Expressionists including Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline.

Stella quickly caught the art world’s eye and became a darling of the New York scene. Before he was 25 years old, he was featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Later, at just 34, the museum made him the subject of a retrospective. Stella would live in Manhattan until his death in 2024.

4. He paved the way for Minimalism

Stella’s early, stripped-down works prefigured the Minimalist movement of the 1960s and ’70s, where artists focused on the essence of a material or shape. His hard edge painting style sharply diverged from the gestural art of Abstract Expressionism. In the monochromatic and geometric Black Paintings, for example, Stella drew on the formal qualities of painting to provoke an immediate response from the viewer. The artist’s famous statement, ‘what you see is what you see’, is often cited as the unofficial motto of Minimalism.

5. AbEx sparked his interest in painting

His early works were inspired by the Abstract Expressionists he encountered in New York. Stella later commented ‘I wouldn’t have bothered becoming an artist if I didn’t like the artists of that generation so much.’ If Pollock and Kline proved influential, so too did the ‘flatness’ of works by Barnett Newman as well as  Jasper Johns, whose 1958 exhibition first inspired Stella to use his now-trademark stripes as a compositional tool.

6. He reshaped printmaking

Stella began his profound engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s. Working with the master printer Kenneth Tyler, he was convinced to make his first prints by filling a Magic Marker — the artist’s preferred drawing implement — with lithography fluid. His abstract prints proved as innovative as his canvas works, and he employed a vast array of techniques, including lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography — a method which Stella is credited with inventing.

Printed by Waddington Custot galleries in 1984, the artist’s Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s ‘Had Gadya’ series is an excellent example of Stella’s diversity as a print maker. Each rhythmic, detailed work combines hand colouring with lithographic, linoleum block and silkscreen.

The artist’s later print works were remarkable not only for their diversity but for their scale. Works in the Had Gadya series measured up to 60 inches, their monumentality expressing an affinity with the architectural structures first hinted at in the space-defining lines of his earliest work.

7. Art filtered into his personal relationships

From 1958-60, he shared a loft with the photographer Hollis Frampton and the sculptor Carl Andre, who said of their relationship ‘we educate each other’. Frampton would go on to document Stella’s artistic process in the tongue-in-cheek photo essay The Secret World of Frank Stella. The piece showed Stella approaching canvases as he would a house — as a space to be filled by increasingly proximate concentric lines. A brief marriage to celebrated art critic Barbara Rose sparked the 1965 show Shape and Structure — one of the earliest exhibitions of Minimal art, curated with the Met’s Henry Geldzahler.

8. He pioneered the shaped canvas

Stella’s works are often called ‘pinstripe paintings’, though the implied regularity of stripes hardly captures the looseness of his approach. When working, he never measured his lines, as many critics have presumed, instead working freehand. He used the pliability of a stretched canvas to create subtle deviations from a perfect straight line.

In his Aluminium Paintings (1960) and Copper Paintings (1960-1961), Stella began to remove sections of the canvas that seemed superfluous. These earliest examples were followed by works that extended the concept of the shaped canvas, including the Irregular Polygon canvases (1965-67) and the later Protractor series (1967-71). Over the next decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, describing his approach as ‘maximalist’ painting, because of its sculptural qualities. For the artist John Chamberlain, he is a ‘sculptor’s painter’.

9. He brought narrative and poetry into abstract art

In 1983 Stella became a professor of poetry at Harvard University — a reflection of the increasing influence of literature in his practice. Stella’s Had Gadya series became one of the most significant examples of this influence. Made from 1982-84, the series of 12 prints was inspired by the Russian artist El Lissitzky’s lithographs of 1919, which were based on the folk song sung following a Passover Seder. Describing the significance of these works, which he saw in a visit to the Tel Aviv Museum in 1981, Stella commented: ‘He [Lissitzky] attempted something few abstract painters have ever tried to do: address a narrative.’

The names of Stella’s works are also significant, loading abstract images with emotional meaning. The brooding reverberations of the Black Paintings were amplified by provocative German titles related to National Socialism and the Nazi Party. The artist commented: ‘The Black Paintings were dark, very dark. Some of them needed dark titles.’

Some titles reference events and places of significance, while others draw from his varied influences. He has named works after tragedies like the Sharpeville massacre, as well as ancient cities of Asia Minor and jazz songs.

10. He was passionate about horseracing

Outside of art, Stella’s main interest was horseracing. At his 120-acre farm in Dutchess County, New York, he bred and raced prize-winning horses for decades. This lifelong interest also influenced his paintings. The artist’s Race Track Series (1972) is named after horseracing tracks in California and Mexico. The works evoke the form of a racetrack seen from above, with concentric ellipses rendered in contrasting colours.