Frank Stella, whose laconic “black paintings” of the late 1950s closed the door on Abstract Expressionism and pointed the way to an era of cool minimalism, died Saturday at his home in Manhattan's West Village. He was 87.
His wife, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, said the cause was lymphoma.
Mr. Stella was a dominant figure in postwar American art, a restless, relentless innovator whose explorations of color and form made him an outsized presence, endlessly discussed and constantly exhibited.
Few 20th century American artists arrived with all his éclat. He was in his early twenties when he started out in a big way black paintings – precisely defined black stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas – took the art world by storm. Austere, self-referential and opaque, they have a chilling spell.
In 1960, art historian William Rubin wrote in the magazine Art International that he was “almost mesmerized” by the paintings' “eerie, magical presence.” Time only validated the consensus.
“They remain some of the most unforgettable, provocative paintings in the recent history of American modernism,” critic Karen Wilkin wrote in The New Criterion in 2007. In 1989, 'Tomlinson Court Park', a black painting from 1959, was sold at auction. for $5 million.
Mr. Stella, a formalist of Calvinistic rigor, rejected all attempts to interpret his work. The sense of mystery, he argued, was a matter of 'technical, spatial and painterly ambiguities'. In an oft-quoted admonition to critics, he emphasized that “what you see is what you see”—a formulation that became the unofficial motto of the minimalist movement.
Over the next five decades, he proved himself a master of reinvention. In the early 1960s, he animated the stripe formula with vibrant colors and shaped cloths. Later in the decade he embarked on the hugely ambitious 'Protractor” series – more than 100 mural-sized murals full of overlapping semi-circles of brilliant, sometimes fluorescent colors. The paintings, inspired by that simple measuring device in the title, “carry the whole idea of chromatic abstraction to a point of almost baroque elaboration,” wrote Hilton Kramer in The New York Times.
The series, first exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan in 1967, made Mr. Stella “a god of the 1960s art world, with an exalted taste for reductive forms, terrifying scale and florid artificial colors.” , said the critic. Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2015. Mr. Stella's impact on abstraction, Mr. Schjeldahl added, “was something like Dylan's on music and Warhol's on pretty much everything.”
In the 1970s and 1980s, Mr. Stella abandoned the flat picture plane with great flourish and pushed his works away from the wall into assemblages full of painted aluminum curls, curves and wreaths.
These 'maximalist paintings', as he called them, were outgoing, cheerful and vibrant with energy, light years away from the brooding authority of the black paintings. They served as a calling card for Mr. Stella's next phase as a designer of major public works, such as the murals for the Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles (1991) and the hat-like bandshell, formed from intricate aluminum ribbons, that he delivered. to the city of Miami in 1997.
Some critics found his work uninviting and programmatic. Harold Rosenberg, writing in The New Yorker in 1970, derided Mr. Stella's ideas as “checkerboard aesthetics.”
Reviewing an exhibition of his earliest paintings in The Times in 2006, Roberta Smith wrote that his work since the early 1980s has been regarded by many as 'inherently corporate'. Mr. Schjeldahl, writing in The New Yorker, dismissed much of the post-1970 work as “disco modernism.”
For most of his career, however, Mr. Stella rode a wave of adulation and enormous commercial success, buoyed by dozens of one-man shows and retrospectives in museums around the world.
After becoming director of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, Mr. Rubin confirmed his admiration for Mr. Stella's work by making him, in 1970, when he was 34, the youngest artist ever honored with a retrospective at the museum. In another unprecedented move, Mr. Rubin organized a second retrospective in 1987.
Mr. Stella was the first abstract artist invited to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lecture at Harvard, in 1983 and 1984. (The lectures were published in 1986 as “Working Space.”) In 2015, when the Whitney Museum of American Art reopened in its new building, in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, the first exhibition was a Stella retrospective.
In 2020, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., presented “Frank Stella's Stars,” a survey of the artist's use of star shapes in various media, highlighted by sculptures created in recent years.
Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, north of Boston, to Frank and Constance (Santonelli) Stella. His mother had attended art school and later started painting landscapes. His father was a gynecologist and also a painting enthusiast.
The younger Frank attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where one of his instructors, the painter, was Bartlett H. Hayes Jr.exposed him to the work of Hans Hofman And Jozef Albers.
At Princeton, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history in 1958, Mr. Stella quickly became friends with the future critic Michael Fried and the future color field painter Walter Darby Bannard.
Once again he was lucky with his teachers. William Seitzwith whom he studied art history, set up an artist in residence program that included the New York abstract painter Stephen Greene taught the school's first studio courses in painting and drawing.
With much encouragement from Mr. Greene, Mr. Stella created gestural paintings in the style of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. But after seeing Jasper Johns' flag paintings at the Castelli Gallery in 1958, he took a cooler, more analytical approach that derived its effects from precision and repetition.
After failing to make his physical army—a childhood accident left him with missing joints on the fingers of his left hand—he settled in a studio on the Lower East Side and began working on the black paintings, supplementing his income by selling houses to paint.
In 1961 he married Barbara Rose, then an art history student but soon a widely read critic of contemporary art. The marriage ended in divorce in 1969; she died in 2020.
Mr. Stella is survived by his wife, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician, and their two sons, Patrick and Peter, are survived by; two children from his first marriage, Rachel and Michael; a daughter, Laura, from an inter-marriage relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse; and five grandchildren.
Recognition came very quickly. His work was shown in group exhibitions at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Castelli in 1959. Later that year, Dorothy Miller included four of his paintings in '16 Americans' at the Museum of Modern Art, which purchased 'The Marriage of Reason and Squalor' . .”
In the following years, Mr. Stella in two important exhibitions: 'Toward a New Abstraction' at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in 1963, and 'Post-Painterly Abstraction', curated by the all-powerful critic Clement Greenberg in the Los Angeles Times. Angeles County Museum in 1964.
In 1965 he was selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where he was the odd man out in a pop-heavy lineup that included Mr. Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg.
By then he had already escaped the endgame aesthetic of the black paintings, using commercial radiator paint to create striped works in copper and aluminum and concentric squares based on primary colors.
In a subsequent series of paintings he reconfigured his canvases to follow the geometry of the stripes. This was the first in a series of quasi-sculptural movements that led to the shaped canvases of the 'Irregular Polygons' series, with their large expanses of uninterrupted colour, and the grandly exuberant Protractor paintings, his first big sellers, the completion of which took him led to a turning point.
“In the late 1960s I felt like I was hitting a wall with the very large Protractor paintings,” he told Sculpture magazine in 2011. “I didn't think I could go any further with color and flatness.”
In the 1970s he began producing metal reliefs that evolved from the vaguely constructivist 'Brazilian' series to the 'Exotic Birds' and 'Indian Birds' series, in which aluminum scrolls, whorls and graffiti-like markings protruded from an aluminum panel or grid.
He moved even further into three dimensions after visiting Rome in the early 1980s and studying the work of Caravaggio, whose intense chiaroscuro and deep space had a profound impact on him. “The space that Caravaggio created is something that twentieth-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what conventional painting has become,” he said in one of the Norton lectures he taught at Harvard.
Although the works were unmistakably three-dimensional, he called them 'maximalist paintings' or 'painted reliefs'.
“However sculptural, three-dimensional or projective they may be from the wall, the essential way in which you view and address them is through the conventions of painting,” he told The Times in 1987.
Mr. Stella continued to explore his signature blend of painting and sculpture in the late 1980s and 1990s in an extensive series of 266 mixed-media reliefs based on “Moby-Dick,” whose 135 chapter titles he applied to the works, and in floral, sometimes raw sculptures such as 'Kamdampat' (2002) and the computer generated “Scarlatti Kirkpatrick” series, started in 2006.
A sculpture of Mr. Stella called “Jasper's Split Star” (2017), constructed from six small geometric grids resting on an aluminum base, was installed in the public square in front of 7 World Trade Center in November 2021.
The full range of his work was on display in the career-spanning “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” at the Whitney in 2015, an outsized show for a towering but divisive figure as obsessed as Ahab in his quest to re-imagine abstraction. to frame.
“Even the clunkers, like a gruesome accumulation of cast aluminum painted with wavy, tie-dye patterns, exhibit a wonderful, indeed Melvillian, ambition,” wrote the critic Jason Farago in The guard. “These are the works of an artist who does not want to and cannot sit still.”
Michael S. Rosenwald reporting contributed.