What is Frank Stella known for?
Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.
Why did Frank Stella stop making Star paintings?
Frank Stella's name means star in Italian, and for decades that was the problem, the reason he stopped making them. "When I started out, I didn't really want to hear about, 'My name was Stella and I made a shape painting of a star.'" But then, computer design technology came along, and 3-D printing. Suddenly the star had possibilities.
What materials does Frank Stella use in his art?
His approach to materials is just as revolutionary, comprising house and car paint, cast aluminium, fibreglass, and the latest 3D-printing techniques. Frank Stella (b. 1936), Lettre Sur Les Aveugles I, 1974. Acrylic on canvas.
How many children does Frank Stella have?
Frank Stella married Harriet McGurk, his second wife, in 1978. He has five children from three relationships. Music and literature influenced much of Stella's later work. In 1982-1984, he created a series of twelve prints titled Had Gaya inspired by a folk song sung at the Jewish Seder.
What type of artwork does Frank Stella make?
PaintingSculpturePrintmakingFrank Stella/Forms
How does Frank Stella make his art?
Stella's abstract prints used lithography, screenprinting, etching and offset lithography. In 1967, he designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one.
Where did Frank Stella work?
New York CityFrank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.
Where is Frank Stella from?
Malden, MAFrank Stella / Place of birthFrank Stella was born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he painted and majored in history. Early visits to New York art galleries would prove to be an influence upon his artistic development.
What mediums does Frank Stella use?
He used acrylic paints, which are very bright and dry quickly, not like oil paint, and he used canvas that had not been treated with a base coat of primer, so they looked raw and unfinished. Over the years his hard-edge paintings got more and more complicated.
What is Frank Stella best known for?
Frank Stella, in full Frank Philip Stella, (born May 12, 1936, Malden, Massachusetts, U.S.), American painter who began as a leading figure in the Minimalist art movement and later became known for his irregularly shaped works and large-scale multimedia reliefs.
What town is Frank Stella's studio in?
Frank Stella Studio - Rock Tavern, NY.
How old is Frank Stella?
86 years (May 12, 1936)Frank Stella / Age
Is Frank Stella married?
Harriet McGurkm. 1978Barbara Rosem. 1961–1969Frank Stella/Spouse
Who are Frank Stella's children?
Patrick StellaMichael StellaPeter StellaRachel StellaFrank Stella/Children
When and where was Frank Stella born?
May 12, 1936 (age 86 years), Malden, MAFrank Stella / Born
Who are minimalist artists?
Yayoi KusamaFrank StellaDonald JuddSol LeWittCarl AndreDan FlavinMinimalism/Artists
What is a relief sculpture in art?
Relief sculpture—sculpture that projects in varying degrees from a two-dimensional background—has a distinguished history dating back over 20,000 years in Eastern and Western cultures. Alto-relievo (high relief) approaches three dimensions while bas-relief (low relief) at times is more akin to two-dimensional drawing.
How do Frank Stellas non rectangular canvases blur the distinction between painting and sculpture?
How do Frank Stella's non-rectangular canvases blur the distinction between painting and sculpture? He used shaped canvases because a rectangular work might still be seen as a picture.
Which movements influenced American minimalist artists?
Earlier European abstract movements greatly influenced American minimalist art creators. In that period, works by the Dutch De Stijl artists, Russian Constructivists, and members of the German Bauhaus were being shown in New York.
Who are minimalist artists?
Yayoi KusamaFrank StellaDonald JuddSol LeWittCarl AndreDan FlavinMinimalism/Artists
What paint did Stella use?
From 1960 Stella began to produce paintings in aluminium and copper paint which, in their presentation of regular lines of color separated by pinstripes, are similar to his black paintings. However they use a wider range of colors, and are his first works using shaped canvases (canvases in a shape other than the traditional rectangle or square), often being in L, N, U or T-shapes. These later developed into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example.
When did Frank Stella start printing?
Late 1960s and early 1970s. Frank Stella Harran II, 1967. Stella began his extended engagement with printmaking in the mid-1960s, working first with master printer Kenneth Tyler at Gemini G.E.L. Stella produced a series of prints during the late 1960s starting with a print called Quathlamba I in 1968.
When did Stella paint his car?
In 1973, he had a print studio installed in his New York house. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project. He has said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery.
How much did Stella's Point of Pines sell for?
In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for Stella's Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million. In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/ascending Green Values (1977) was sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million with premium)in London.
When was Stella's apartment in Greenwich Village designated a landmark?
After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark. After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio.
Where did Stella go to high school?
After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover , Massachusetts, where he learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
Where does Frank Stella live?
Stella lives and works in New York City.
What style of painting did Stella paint?
He originally painted in an Abstract Expressionist style, but, upon moving to New York City in the late 1950s, he began work on a series of innovative paintings marked by an austere and monumental simplicity of design. The “black paintings,” which established his reputation, incorporated symmetrical series of thin white stripes that replicated the canvas shape when seen against their black backgrounds. Those works—e.g., The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, II (1959 )—were included in the landmark exhibition “Sixteen Americans” at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1959–60. He had his first solo exhibition in 1960 at the Leo Castelli Gallery, also in New York City. In the early 1960s Stella painted a series of progressively more complex variations on the theme of the frame-determined design and used both metallic-coloured paints and irregularly shaped canvases to that purpose. Stella expanded his use of colour in the Protractor series (1967–71), an influential group of paintings marked by intersecting geometric and curvilinear shapes and plays of vivid and harmonious colours, some of which were fluorescent.
What did Leo Castelli do in 1960?
By beginning to represent Frank Stella in 1960, Castelli also began to promote and direct the emergence of Minimalism. Castelli’s international reputation received a significant boost when, in 1964, Rauschenberg became the first American artist to win the grand prize at the Venice Biennale. The Leo Castelli Gallery soon…
What is Stella's Moby Dick based on?
In the mid-1980s he embarked on a major project that took its title from and was based on Herman Melville ’s Moby Dick. Between 1985 and 1997 Stella created some 260 pieces in the series, including prints, sculptures, and reliefs named after chapters in Melville’s novel.
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Where did Frank Stella study?
Stella studied painting at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, ...
Where is the Schauspiel 3X?
Some of them—such as Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X (1998–2001), a 31-foot (9.4-metre) mixed-media sculpture installed in front of the National Gallery of Art in Washington , D.C. —were public art commissions.
Who was the first American painter to paint black chevrons?
Frank Stella, thought by many to be the preeminent American painter of the late 20th century, began as a Minimalist, making extremely simple paintings of black chevrons from which everything was banished except the barest minimum of painterly cues. Yet in his subsequent work he…
What was Stella's first medium?
The artist first began to make a profound engagement with the medium in the mid-1960s, working with master printer Kenneth Tyler, who convinced Stella 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, employing a vast array of techniques, including lithography, screenprinting, etching, and offset lithography — a method which Stella himself is credited with inventing. Printed by Waddington Custot galleries, 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 combining hand colouring with lithographic, linoleum block and silkscreen.
What is Stella's Had Gadya series?
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 the Seder, the religious meal served in Jewish homes on the first or second night of Passover. 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.’
What is Stella's 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 2D canvas to become sculptural. His approach to materials is just as revolutionary, comprising house and car paint, cast aluminium, fibreglass, and the latest 3D-printing techniques.
How old was Stella when he had his first retrospective?
His work featured in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art before he was 25, and he had his first retrospective at the museum when he was just 34 — far younger than many artists to have received the same honour. Hospitalised for knee surgery when the show opened, Stella used the occasion, not to take stock, but to produce reams of drawings. ‘I don’t know how to draw in the sense of pure drawing. I need to go to the material stage as quickly as I can,’ he concluded.
What is Frank Stella's approach to painting?
Over the next decade, Stella introduced relief into his art, describing his approach as ‘maximalist’ painting, because of its sculptural qualities. For artist John Chamberlain, he is a ‘sculptor’s painter’. Frank Stella (b. 1936), Talladega II, 1982.
What does the song "Then came a dog and bit the cat" mean?
Though its meaning is open to interpretation, the song is commonly read as a symbolic reference to the nations that have suppressed Israel throughout history.
How long did Stella's father work?
His father worked 60-hour weeks, and insisted his son both study hard and learn the importance of manual labour. Stella’s first experience of painting was re-coating houses and boats — generally on his father’s orders. 3. He developed a reputation for feistiness.
What is the name of the painting that was painted in 1959?
This new aesthetic found expression in a series of new paintings, the Black Paintings (59) in which regular bands of black paint were separated by very thin pinstripes of unpainted canvas. Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) is one such painting.
What is Frank Stella's art style?
Frank Stella is an Italian American painter and printmaker, significant in the art movement called ”post-painterly abstraction”. His early works anticipates many elements of minimalism, which is why he is also considered by some a minimalist, although most of his later artworks are not strictly minimalist.
Where did Stella go to high school?
After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries fostered his artistic development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
Where was Stella born?
Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried.
Where did Frank Stella move to?
Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career.
Where did the raised banner come from?
It takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party , and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization.
Where was Stella's art displayed?
In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (60).
Why is Frank Stella called a maximalist?
Stella added wood, paper, and felt to a painted canvas and called them maximalist paintings because of their three-dimensional elements. His works began blurring the distinctions between painting and sculpture.
What is Frank Stella's style?
Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American artist known for developing a Minimalist style that rejected the emotionality of Abstract Expressionism. His earliest celebrated works were painted in black. Throughout his career, Stella shifted to a more exuberant use of color, shapes and curving forms.
What book did Frank Stella create?
From the mid-1980s through the mid-1990s, Frank Stella created multiple pieces related to Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick. Each piece was inspired by a different chapter in the book. He used a wide variety of techniques, creating works that range from giant sculptures to mixed-media prints.
What is the name of the painting that Frank Stella painted in the 1960s?
One of those was "The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, " a series of black inverted parallel U-shapes with stripes separated by thin lines of blank canvas.
What did Stella mean by "a flat surface with paint on it, nothing more"?
Stella considered his paintings objects instead of a representation of something physical or emotional. He said that a painting was "a flat surface with paint on it, nothing more.". In 1959, Stella's black-striped paintings were positively received by the New York art scene.
How many children does Frank Stella have?
Frank Stella married Harriet McGurk, his second wife, in 1978. He has five children from three relationships.
What was Stella's interest in painting?
He was interested in Barnett Newman's color field experiments and Jasper Johns' target paintings.
How many feet is the carbon fiber star in the Aldrich?
CBS News. It certainly is. The one in the show at the Aldrich is 21 feet in all directions. Stella waxed about the feeling of the material: "The people who did the carbon fiber, they do work for Formula One," as in race cars.
Why did Frank Stella stop making paintings?
Frank Stella's name means star in Italian, and for decades that was the problem, the reason he stopped making them. "When I started out, I didn't really want to hear about, 'My name was Stella and I made a shape painting of a star.'"
What was the puff star made of?
He showed Teichner a black model of a sculpture which he called a "puff star," made from carbon fiber.
What are smoke rings made of?
But fourteen years later, the smoke rings evolved. They're free-floating, three-dimensional, made out of slick, painted fiberglass or aluminum tubing. It even looks huge in Stella's airplane hangar-sized studio in Upstate New York, which resembles a meander through his brain at various points in his career.
Where is the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art?
The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut, has gathered a small galaxy of Frank Stella's stars, old and new. "Jasper's Split Star" (2017) by Frank Stella, at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, in Ridgefield, Conn. CBS News. They may look really different from each other to you or me, but to the artist, ...
Who asked "Were you happy with the results"?
Teichner asked, "Were you happy with the results?"
Who said "They feel quite comfortable here"?
Frank Stella, who's spent a lifetime keeping the human form out of his work, admits that humanity has crept in anyway. "They feel quite comfortable here," he said.
How old is Frank Stella?
The artist’s Minimalist abstractions helped change the direction of painting at the start of his career. Now at the end of it, the 83-year-old artist looks back to his beginnings. Frank Stella in his studio in upstate New York, photographed on Dec. 18, 2019.
What do stars represent?
But most of all, they symbolize the limits of human understanding, their geometric representation inseparable from their existence as celestial objects, luminous spheres of gas held together by their own gravity. Their lyricism aside, stars are our most archaic form of navigation as well as our best clues to the dimensions of the universe. Because light travels at a finite speed, the glow of a distant star is perceived by our earthbound eyes long after it has ceased to exist. Similarly finite, perhaps, is the rate of human understanding: In art history, we’re continually revising the past based on our relative position to it; the importance of an artist or an entire movement might become visible only in retrospect. So what, one wonders, is left to say about a man who has been famous now since the 1950s, and all the more so at a time in which figuration and portraiture have made comebacks, and when we’re all questioning art’s relevance in a scary new decade?
How many children does Stella have?
When we meet, the artist has just celebrated the arrival of his fifth grandchild, Sophie. (Stella, who has five children, has been married to Harriet McGurk, a pediatrician, since 1978, and they live in the same house in Greenwich Village he’s owned since the 1960s; his first wife was the art critic Barbara Rose .)
What are some examples of artists who have become obsessed with the creation of a particular shape or motif throughout their lives?
Many artists have become fixated on the creation of a particular shape or motif throughout their lives: Jasper Johns and flags; Pablo Picasso and guitars; Louise Bourgeois and spiders. The ceaseless exploration of one form helps create an artist’s aesthetic universe, and Stella is part of this tradition.
Why is material experimentation necessary?
On many occasions, material experimentation offered a pathway forward: “That’s a kind of necessity, because you get bogged down, you get worried . You’re always looking for something, as they say, a way out of the darkness. And it’s inevitable that you look to things. You look to what other people are doing, and you look to what’s available, and you can’t help looking for things. Mostly you look within the art world, but that seems like a limited vision, so you have to look outside. You have to get with the real world eventually.”
Where did Stella's mother paint Jackson Pollock?
While repainting the porch of their fishing cabin in New Hampshire — Stella grew up in the Boston suburb of Malden — his mother, a fashion illustrator and homemaker, decided to make a Jackson Pollock on the floor, dripping the paint in swirls.
Where is Frank Stella's studio?
This hangar-like structure, about a 90-minute drive north of Manhattan, has been Frank Stella ’s studio for the past two decades.
Overview
Frank Philip Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. Stella lives and works in New York City.
Biography
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent. His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.
After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, where he learned about abstract modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann, he attended Princeton University, wh…
Work
Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be i…
Artists' rights
Stella had been an advocate of strong copyright protection for artists such as himself. On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society ) published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located".
Exhibitions
Stella's work was included in several exhibitions in the 1960s, among them the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum’s The Shaped Canvas (1965) and Systemic Painting (1966). The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970. His art has since been the subject of several retrospectives in the United States, Europe, and Japan. In 2012, a retrospective of Stella's career was shown at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
Collections
In 2014, Stella gave his sculpture Adjoeman (2004) as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The Menil Collection, Houston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; the Toledo Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; and many others.
Recognition
Among the many honors he has received was an invitation from Harvard University to give the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984. Calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting, these six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.
In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama. In 201…
Art market
Since 2014, Stella has been represented worldwide in an exclusive arrangement shared by Dominique Lévy and Marianne Boesky. In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for Stella's Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.
In April 2021, his Scramble: Ascending Spectrum/ascending Green Values (1977) was sold for £2.4 million ($3.2 million with premium)in London. The painting was bought for $1.9 million in 2…