Frank Stella, whose laconic pinstripe “black work” of the late Nineteen Fifties closed the door on Summary Expressionism and pointed the best way to an period of cool minimalism, died on Saturday at his residence within the West Village of Manhattan. He was 87.
His spouse, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, mentioned the trigger was lymphoma.
Mr. Stella was a dominant determine in postwar American artwork, a stressed, relentless innovator whose explorations of coloration and kind made him an outsize presence, endlessly mentioned and always on exhibit.
Few American artists of the Twentieth century arrived with fairly his éclat. He was in his early 20s when his large-scale black work — exactly delineated black stripes separated by skinny strains of clean canvas — took the artwork world by storm. Austere, self-referential, opaque, they solid a chilling spell.
Writing in Artwork Worldwide journal in 1960, the artwork historian William Rubin declared himself “nearly mesmerized” by the “eerie, magical presence” of the work. Time solely ratified the consensus.
“They continue to be a few of the most unforgettable, provocative work within the latest historical past of American Modernism,” the critic Karen Wilkin wrote in The New Criterion in 2007. In 1989, “Tomlinson Courtroom Park,” a black portray from 1959, offered at public sale for $5 million.
Mr. Stella, a formalist of Calvinist severity, rejected all makes an attempt to interpret his work. The sense of thriller, he argued, was a matter of “technical, spatial and painterly ambiguities.” In an oft-quoted admonition to critics, he insisted that “what you see is what you see” — a formulation that turned the unofficial motto of the minimalist motion.
Over the following 5 many years, he proved himself a grasp of reinvention. Within the early Nineteen Sixties he animated the stripe formulation with vibrant colours and formed canvases. Later within the decade, he launched into the wildly bold “Protractor” sequence — greater than 100 mural-size work crowded with overlapping half-circles of sensible, generally fluorescent, coloration. The work, impressed by that easy measuring instrument within the title, “carry the entire notion of chromatic abstraction to some extent of virtually baroque elaboration,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Occasions.
First exhibited on the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan in 1967, the sequence made Mr. Stella “a god of the sixties artwork world, exalting tastes for reductive kind, daunting scale, and florid synthetic coloration,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The New Yorker in 2015. Mr. Stella’s affect on abstraction, Mr. Schjeldahl added, “was one thing like Dylan’s on music and Warhol’s on roughly all the pieces.”
Within the Seventies and ’80s, with nice panache, Mr. Stella deserted the flat image aircraft, pushing his works away from the wall in assemblages bristling with painted aluminum curlicues, curves and whorls.
These “maximalist work,” as he known as them, had been extroverted, joyous and buzzing with vitality, light-years faraway from the brooding authority of the black work. They served as a calling card for Mr. Stella’s subsequent section, as a designer of huge public works, such because the murals for the Gasoline Firm Tower in Los Angeles (1991) and the hatlike bandshell, shaped of convoluted aluminum ribbons, that he delivered to town of Miami in 1997.
Some critics discovered his work uninviting and programmatic. Harold Rosenberg, writing in The New Yorker in 1970, scoffed at Mr. Stella’s concepts as “chessboard aesthetics.”
Reviewing an exhibition of his earliest work in The Occasions in 2006, Roberta Smith wrote that his work because the early Eighties was regarded by many as “inherently company.” Mr. Schjeldahl, in The New Yorker, dismissed a lot of the work after 1970 as “disco modernism.”
For many of his profession, nonetheless, Mr. Stella rode a wave of adulation and stupendous industrial success, buoyed by dozens of one-man exhibits and retrospectives at museums world wide.
Mr. Rubin, after turning into the Museum of Trendy Artwork’s director of portray and sculpture, reaffirmed his admiration for Mr. Stella’s work by making him the youngest artist ever to be honored with a retrospective on the museum in 1970, when he was 34. In one other unprecedented transfer, Mr. Rubin mounted a second retrospective in 1987.
Mr. Stella was the primary summary artist to be invited to ship the Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, in 1983 and 1984. (The lectures had been revealed in 1986 as “Working Area.”) In 2015, when the Whitney Museum of American Artwork reopened in its new constructing, within the Chelsea part of Manhattan, the inaugural exhibition was a Stella retrospective.
In 2020, the Aldrich Modern Artwork Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., offered “Frank Stella’s Stars,” a survey of the artist’s use of star kinds in varied mediums, culminating in sculptures made in the previous few years.
Frank Philip Stella was born on Might 12, 1936, in Malden, Mass., north of Boston, to Frank and Constance (Santonelli) Stella. His mom had gone to artwork college and later took up panorama portray. His father was a gynecologist and in addition a portray fanatic.
The youthful Frank attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the place one among his instructors, the painter Bartlett H. Hayes Jr., uncovered him to the work of Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers.
At Princeton, the place he earned a bachelor’s diploma in historical past in 1958, Mr. Stella turned quick buddies with the long run critic Michael Fried and the long run color-field painter Walter Darby Bannard.
Once more he was lucky in his academics. William Seitz, with whom he studied artwork historical past, established an artist in residence program below which the New York summary painter Stephen Greene gave the college’s first studio programs in portray and drawing.
With a lot encouragement from Mr. Greene, Mr. Stella turned out gestural work within the method of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. However after seeing Jasper Johns’s flag work on the Castelli Gallery in 1958, he took a cooler, extra analytic strategy that derived its results from precision and repetition.
After failing his Military bodily — a childhood accident had left him with lacking joints on the fingers of his left hand — he settled right into a studio on the Decrease East Facet and started engaged on the black work, supplementing his revenue by portray homes.
In 1961, he married Barbara Rose, an art-history pupil on the time however quickly to change into a extensively learn critic of up to date artwork. The wedding led to divorce in 1969; she died in 2020.
Mr. Stella is survived by his spouse, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician, and their two sons, Patrick and Peter; two youngsters from his first marriage, Rachel and Michael; a daughter, Laura, from a relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages; and 5 grandchildren.
Recognition got here with lightning pace. His work was proven in group exhibitions on the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Castelli in 1959. Later that 12 months, Dorothy Miller included 4 of his work in “16 Individuals” on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, which purchased “The Marriage of Purpose and Squalor.”
Within the subsequent few years Mr. Stella appeared in two essential exhibits: “Towards a New Abstraction,” on the Jewish Museum in Manhattan in 1963, and “Put up-Painterly Abstraction,” curated by the omnipotent critic Clement Greenberg on the Los Angeles County Museum in 1964.
In 1965, he was chosen to signify the USA on the Venice Biennale, the place 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 aesthetics of the black work, utilizing industrial radiator paint to supply striped works in copper and aluminum and concentric squares primarily based on major colours.
In a subsequent sequence of work, he reconfigured his canvases to comply with the geometry of the stripes. This was the primary in a sequence of quasi-sculptural strikes resulting in the formed canvases of the “Irregular Polygons” sequence, with their massive expanses of unbroken coloration, and the grandly exuberant Protractor work, his first large sellers, whose completion introduced him to a turning level.
“By the late ’60s, I appeared to hit a wall with the very massive Protractor work,” he instructed the journal Sculpture in 2011. “I didn’t suppose I may take coloration and floor flatness any farther.”
Within the Seventies, he started producing steel reliefs that progressed from the vaguely Constructivist “Brazilian” sequence to the “Unique Birds” and “Indian Birds” sequence, wherein aluminum curls, whorls and graffiti-like marks jutted out from an aluminum panel or grid.
He veered even additional into three dimensions after visiting Rome within the early Eighties and learning the work of Caravaggio, whose intense chiaroscuro and deep house made a profound affect on him. “The house that Caravaggio created is one thing that Twentieth-century portray may use: an alternate each to the house of typical realism and to the house of what has come to be typical painterliness,” he mentioned in one of many Norton lectures he delivered at Harvard.
Though the works had been undeniably three-dimensional, he referred to them as “maximalist work” or “painted reliefs.”
“Irrespective of how sculptural or three-dimensional or projective they is likely to be from the wall, the important manner that you simply have a look at them and tackle them is thru the conventions of portray,” he instructed The Occasions in 1987.
Mr. Stella continued to discover his distinctive mix of portray and sculpture within the late Eighties and ’90s in an prolonged sequence of 266 mixed-media reliefs primarily based on “Moby-Dick,” whose 135 chapter titles he utilized to the works, and in florid, often raucous sculptures like “Kamdampat” (2002) and the computer-generated “Scarlatti Kirkpatrick” sequence, begun in 2006.
A sculpture of Mr. Stella’s known as “Jasper’s Cut up Star” (2017), constructed out of six small geometric grids that relaxation on an aluminum base, was put in within the public plaza in entrance of seven World Commerce Middle in November 2021.
The total vary of his work was on show within the career-encompassing “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” on the Whitney in 2015, an outsize present for a towering if divisive determine, as obsessed as Ahab in his quest to reframe abstraction.
“Even the clunkers, akin to a ghastly pileup of solid aluminum painted with wavy, tie-dye patterns, exhibit prodigious, certainly Melvillian, ambition,” the critic Jason Farago wrote in The Guardian. “They’re the works of an artist unwilling, unable, to take a seat nonetheless.”
Michael S. Rosenwald contributed reporting.
