Frank Stella
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.[1] Stella lives and works in New York City.
Frank Stella
- Painter
- printmaker
- sculpture
- architect
1984 Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton lectures
National Medal of Arts
Biography[edit]
Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts to first-generation Italian-American parents. [2] His father was a gynecologist, and his mother was a housewife and artist who attended fashion school and later took up landscape painting.[3]
After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts,[4] he attended Princeton University. His work was influenced by abstract expressionism.[5] He is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.[6]
In the 1970s he moved into NoHo in Manhattan in New York City.[7] As of 2015, Stella lived in Greenwich Village and kept an office there but commuted on weekdays to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York.[3]
Stella, detail of BMW 3.0 CSL car-painting, 1976
Stella, Cones and Pillars, part 2., c. 1984; painting
Stella, Moby Dick, 1991–1993; wall-relief in The Ritz-Carlton, Singapore
Stella, Peekskill, 1995; sculpture of premium steel at Ernst-Abbe-Platz in Jena, Germany
Stella, Cornucopia, c. 2000; sculpture in fiberglass
Collections[edit]
In 2014, Stella gave his sculpture Adjoeman (2004) as a long-term loan to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.[27] 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 Pérez Art Museum Miami;[24] the Toledo Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Portland Art Museum, Oregon; the List Visual Arts Center at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge;[26] and many others.[28]
Recognition[edit]
Stella gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1984, calling for a rejuvenation of abstraction by achieving the depth of baroque painting.[29] These six talks were published by Harvard University Press in 1986 under the title Working Space.[30]
In 2009, Frank Stella was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Barack Obama.[31] In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture by the International Sculpture Center. [citation needed] In 1996, he received an honorary Doctorate from the University of Jena in Jena, (Germany), where his large sculptures of the "Hudson River Valley Series" are on permanent display, becoming the second artist to receive this honorary degree after Auguste Rodin in 1906.[32]
Art market[edit]
In May 2019, Christie's set an auction record for Stella's Point of Pines, which sold for $28 million.[33]
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 2006 from the collection of Belgian art patrons Roger and Josette Vanthournout at Sotheby’s.[34]
Personal life[edit]
From 1961-1969 Stella was married to art historian Barbara Rose; they had two children, Rachel and Michael.[35] In 1978 he married pediatrician Harriet McGurk.[36]