40 Facts About Frank Stella

Frank Philip Stella was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.

Frank Stella lived and worked in New York City for much of his career before moving his studio to Rock Tavern, New York.

Frank Stella moved to New York City in the late 1950s, where he created works which emphasized the picture-as-object.

Frank Stella won notice in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown at the Museum of Modern Art.

Frank Stella was a recipient of the National Medal of Arts in 2009 and the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center in 2011.

Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12,1936, to first-generation Italian-American parents, as the oldest of their three children.

Frank Stella's father painted houses to pay his way through medical school, with young Stella as his helper.

Frank Stella went to high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where Carl Andre, later to become a minimalist sculptor, was in the class ahead of him, but Andre said they never actually met.

Frank Stella called the interior a "vast space more easily traversed by golf cart than on foot", divided into separate rooms for fabrication and display, with a curtain hanging in the rear behind which he kept his spray-painter, his industrial sander, and new works being assembled.

Frank Stella's work was a catalyst for the minimalist movement in the late 1950s; he stressed the properties of the materials he used in his paintings, disavowing any conception of art as a means of expressing emotion.

Frank Stella made a splash in the New York art world in 1959 when his four black pinstripe paintings were shown in the Sixteen Americans exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art, along with works by Louise Nevelson, Ellsworth Kelly, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg.

Frank Stella shared studio space with Hollis Frampton and Carl Andre, both of whom had attended Phillips Academy, and scrounged a living by renting cold-water flats and painting houses.

Frank Stella repudiated all efforts by critics to interpret his work.

In 1961, Frank Stella followed Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, to Pamplona, Spain, where she had gone on a Fulbright fellowship; they married in London that November.

In 1967, Frank Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham.

Frank Stella was especially intrigued by the arches and decorative patterns he observed in the architecture and art of Iran.

Frank Stella's painting, Protractor Variation I, now at the Perez Art Museum Miami, epitomizes his move away from ascetic, monochrome compositions to the vibrant colors and formal complexity of his output after the late 1960s.

In 1969, Frank Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial.

Frank Stella was among those artists invited to participate in the problem-plagued 35th Art Biennale in Venice who joined a boycott by artists opposed to the US wars in Vietnam and Cambodia and withdrew their works from display at the American Pavilion.

Frank Stella presented wood and other materials in his Polish Village series, executed in high relief.

Frank Stella abandoned rational structures in the mid-1970s and began to explore new, individualistic paths.

Frank Stella replaced solid planes with sqiggles, lattices, and swirls of color.

In 1976, Frank Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Series.

From 1978 to 2005, Frank Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored.

Frank Stella was inspired by the sonatas, and his series works, like the sonatas, are given "K" numbers, but they allude to Scarlatti's music abstractly with visual rhythm and movement, according to Frank Stella, rather than literal correlation.

Frank Stella continued producing new works in the series into 2012.

In late 2022, Frank Stella launched his first NFT for his Geometries project in collaboration with the Artists Rights Society.

In 2012, a retrospective of Frank Stella's career was shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.

In 2014, Frank Stella gave his sculpture Adjoeman as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

Frank Stella's works are in the collections of many major art institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Perez Art Museum Miami; the List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge; the Tate; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice; and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

Frank Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.

In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.

Frank Stella was heralded by the Birmingham Museum of Art for having created abstract paintings that bear "no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting".

Frank Stella writes that critics have always been disconcerted by the fact that "the godfather of Minimalist painting" became a forbear of modern baroque.

Frank Stella sees Stella as working in profound torment over the inferences made by those early works, moving ever further away from them, and disavowing them more vehemently with every new series.

Frank Stella later had a squash court built at his horse farm in upstate New York, and formed close friendships with many squash players.

Frank Stella was a player, promoter, sponsor and creator of our perpetual trophy.

From 1961 to 1969, Frank Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.

Frank Stella had a daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages.

Frank Stella died of lymphoma at his home in West Village, Manhattan, on May 4,2024, eight days before his 88th birthday.