Throughout his prolific career as a painter, sculptor, printmaker and architect, Frank Stella has been known for helping to launch the Minimalism movement and then for breaking away from it. First impacting the art world by endowing non-representational artwork with new significance, Stella's instantly acclaimed 1958 Minimalist paintings contrasted Abstract Expressionism's emotional canvases. He has constantly reinvented himself, creating increasingly textured, dynamic and vivid work. Stella continues to work and advocate for artists' right today.

• Although he began creating art when Abstract Expressionism's gestural brushstrokes were the dominant technique, Stella painted flat, smooth works that led the art world in another direction, towards Minimalism.
• Stella was an early advocate of making non-representational paintings, rather than artwork that alluded to underlying meanings, emotions or narratives. He wanted his audiences to appreciate color, shape and structure alone.
• Stella challenged the very notion of a painting by declaring his flat canvases, structured reliefs, metal protrusions and freestanding sculptures all to be paintings.

Frank Stella was born the oldest of three children to first-generation Italian-American parents. In his sophomore year of high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, he began learning to paint from Abstractionist Patrick Morgan, who taught at the school. Stella continued taking art courses at Princeton University while earning a degree in history. His Princeton professors, painter Stephen Greene and art historian William Seitz, introduced Stella to the New York art world by bringing him to exhibitions in the city, shaping his earliest artistic aesthetic.

These trips to New York galleries exposed Stella to artists such as Jackson Pollack, Franz Kline and particularly Jasper Johns. Johns' geometric paintings of flags and targets inspired Stella's work during his Princeton years. After graduating, Stella moved to the Lower East Side of New York, where he set up a studio in a former jeweler's store. Almost immediately, he drew massive attention from the art world. His innovative work, which utilized a monochromatic palette and flat surfaces, signaled a break from the thick, textural paint and gestural compositions of the Abstract Expressionists. Stella famously called a painting "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more," which demonstrated his view of art as an object in itself, rather than a representation of something emotional, intellectual or physical. With their emphasis on form, not content, his early paintings are often credited with helping to establish the Minimalist artistic movement. For his first major works, the stark "Black Paintings" (1958-1960), Stella covered canvases with black house paint, leaving unpainted pinstripes in repetitive, parallel patterns. At only 23 years old, he gained instant recognition for these intense paintings. The MoMA included four in its 1959-1960 Sixteen Americans exhibition and purchased one for the permanent collection. That same year, famed gallery owner Leo Castelli began representing Stella and his work.

From his Black Paintings, Stella moved onto the Aluminum Paintings (1960) and the Copper Paintings (1960-1961), for which he created his own geometrically shaped canvases, challenging the traditional rectangular structure. Much of his work at this time drew on the stripe motif begun with the Black Paintings, but he soon expanded to brighter colors and worked complex circular forms into his compositions, especially in the Irregular Polygon (1965-1967) and Protractor (1967-1971) series. During this period, Stella also began delving into printmaking, an aspect of his work he passionately pursued throughout his career.

In 1970, Stella was the youngest artist to become the subject of a retrospective at MoMA, receiving a second in 1987. Following this exhibit, Stella reinvented himself once again, and began incorporating collage and relief into his paintings - an extension of the layered bands of color in his previous works. For the Polish Village series (1970-1973), he attached paper, felt and wood to canvas. And building on this trajectory, the later Indian Birds series (1977-1979) featured an assemblage of painted aluminum forms protruding from the wall. This growing focus on three-dimensionality and dynamic textures sharply contrasted the flat, smooth work that had first brought Stella into the public eye. He continued pushing the idea further, creating sculptural works marked by elaborate tangles of curves, spirals and loops, which were more representative of a Baroque style than his initial Minimalism. Yet, even these highly sculptural works are still "paintings" in Stella's eyes. He claimed, "A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere."

In 1980s and 1990s, Stella expanded his three-dimensional paintings into increasingly explosive, vividly colored and multifaceted pieces, while still continuing to create innovative prints. His series based on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick includes works of all types, from metal reliefs, to giant sculptures, to mixed-media prints combining diverse techniques such as woodblock printing, etching and hand-coloring. After moving towards freestanding bronze and steel sculptures, Stella's work then grew to include architectural structures, reflecting his comment, "It's hard not to think about architecture when you've gone from painting to relief to sculpture." These works include an aluminum band shell in Miami (1999) and a monumental sculpture, Prinz Friedrich von Homburg, Ein Schauspiel, 3X (1998-2001), on the lawn of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. (1998-2001). Currently living and working in New York, Stella continues to create large-scale sculptures, as well as designs for potential architectural projects.

Frank Stella secured his place in art history as one of the first proponents of Minimalism, and has remained a key figure through his consistent ability to re-conceive his artistic directions. While many thought his earliest paintings were a rejection of Abstract Expressionism, Stella never viewed them as such, and his admiration for the movement's dynamism and tactility was realized in his later work.


Below are Frank Stella's major influences, and the people and ideas that he influenced in turn.


"What you see is what you see."

"A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.''

"Making art is complicated because the categories are always changing. You just have to make your own art, and whatever categories it falls into will come later."

"I think that many gestures artists make, gestures that seem casual and improbable but surprisingly effective in making art, can be made available to architecture."