Frank Stella, the painter who drastically changed the face of abstract art

In 1970, at the age of 33, Frank Stella was the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Moma in New York. He had already been active for more than ten years and pioneered abstract work in series and paintings in the form of shaped canvases. Critics did not react unanimously, but they did praise Stella’s versatility and sense of variety. Here a new path was shown for non-figurative art: that was pretty much the gist.

Stella himself saw his cool minimalism as an answer to the stormy romanticism of his time: that of abstract expressionism, which germinated in the US after the Second World War and remained trend-setting for a long time.

He was part of the exhibition as early as 1959 Sixteen Americans, also at the Moma, with emerging artists such as Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and Ellsworth Kelly. He showed four black paintings, almost monochrome black canvases with symmetrically applied stripes. They made a great impression because of their size, their strictness and daring.

Deviating shapes

Frank Stella died in Manhattan at the age of 87 in his New York apartment from complications of lymph cancer. He was born in Malden, a suburb of Boston. His mother was a painter and his father, a gynecologist, was also creative with paint. Frank studied history at Princeton University and in the meantime took painting lessons.

In 1958 he moved to New York, was impressed by the work of Franz Kline and started his series of black paintings with only black stripes. After his debut at the Moma, Stella was picked up by gallery owner Leo Castelli, who gave him a solo exhibition in 1960 with paintings in unusual shapes. In doing so he demonstrated that a painting does not have to represent something else, but that it is itself an object.

The New York Times characterized Stella as “a formalist of Calvinistic strictness”. With his famous motto ‘What you see is what you see‘ he torpedoed all attempts to interpret his work. He also became a frontman of American minimalism.

Glitter paint

But that strictness was only one facet. Stella constantly reinvented herself. He soon evolved into a more vital, exuberant form of abstract art. He opted for large, wall-filling formats.

He would later deny that a painting did not have to suggest any depth. It ultimately resulted in works that left the flat surface: assembled metal objects that he painted with bright, vibrant colors and even glitter paint. He also continued to regard free-standing sculptures, pieced together with cut-out strips of metal, cones and columns, as paintings. In 1991 they were the eye-catchers of an exhibition in the Casino of Knokke, stimulated by collector and art promoter Roger Nellens.

Frank Stella’s work enjoyed great commercial success. He continued to occupy a prominent place on the art market for a long time. In 2004 he was one of the ten most expensive living artists, a list that was led at that time by Jasper Johns. In 2019, Stella’s Point of Pines auctioned at Christie’s for $28 million, his personal record.

Much of his work also appeared in the public space. It was three years ago Jasper’s split star installed at the foot of one of the new World Trade Center buildings in Manhattan.