Frank Stella, painter and sculptor who redefined abstractionism and gave birth to minimalism, dies at 87

A huge, black canvas, with equidistant lines, rhombuses converging towards an unmarked center, half circles painted in flourishing colors, one above the other, like a rainbow. There are pieces by Frank Stella (1936-2024) that are almost immediately recognizable. Stella, one of the most important American artists of the 20th century, known for shattering all artistic fields associated with abstractionism, and for the use of patterns and geometric shapes in the creation of paintings and sculptures that were often gigantic, died at home in New York , a victim of lymphoma, said his wife, Harriet E. McGurk.

Born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied History at Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958. It was there that she immersed herself in the world of Abstract Expressionism, and therefore in the world of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko , Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newmann, Clyfford Still. His “frugal paintings”, were made in resistance to this movement, did not contain any color, were not artistic entertainment nor were they intended to provide any visual stimulation. Stella argued that “what you see is what you see”, a way of seeing art devoid of any meaning before or after its execution, at least for the artist. This is still the motto of minimalism today.

To many, Stella continues to be best known for his ‘Black Paintings’, a series that began with four paintings exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York when Stella was just 23 and eventually included some 24 large-scale canvases. , each one composed of concentric bands or white stripes on a black canvas, rigid, rigorous, inescapable. These are the paintings most easily identifiable with the artist, just as Rothko’s blocks of color are the ones that everyone cites, despite the artist having several other moments in his career, far from the oppressive black or purple windows he painted in screens from ceiling to floor.

“Abstraction did not have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curved geometry. It could be a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with shapes”, explained Stella himself, in a profile published on the ArtNet website. “It wouldn’t be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of shapes and colors would give a narrative meaning. We could have the sensation of an abstract piece flowing and being part of an action or activity”, he further said.

His subversive intention was the driving force behind his art. His work often approached a form of zero degree abstraction, his paintings became maximalist, they are sweeping colors arranged in patterns that are difficult to look away from. One of his indisputable legacies is the production of non-rectangular canvases, which point more towards the domain of sculpture. Over time, his works begin to literally come off the wall, materializing into fluid and compact constructions at the same time, such as his sculptures inspired by the shape of Cuban cigar smoke, which, in the late 80s and until 2017, continued to inspire him. His “Smoke Rings”, as the compositions he made with “smoke” are known, are floating, three-dimensional and made of painted fiberglass or aluminum tubes.

Stella described the progress of her work from the late 1950s onwards as a transition from “minimalism to maximalism”, as the curator writes. Kate Nesin in the introduction to Phaidon’s book about the artist. “It was as if, in proclaiming his own subsequent trends, he accepted the ‘ism’ of one side only to abandon it. Thus, we arrive at what appears, in retrospect, to be a concerted trajectory that moves away from the reducibility of ‘Black Paintings’: only in the 1960s did the striped works of the early years of that decade cease to be rectangular — first, the corners were cut, later, the canvases took on more radical shapes, eventually becoming lateral and covering entire walls.”

At the end of the 60s he began another series that would also define him for posterity, just as the blackboards had done 10 years earlier. He embarked on the ambitious “Protractor” series — “protractor” in Portuguese — and made more than 100 mural-sized paintings filled with overlapping half-circles of bright, sometimes fluorescent colors. The paintings, which are actually shaped like the half-circle of a protractor and seem to have been inspired by just that, “elevate the whole notion of chromatic abstraction to a point of almost baroque elaboration,” wrote Hilton Kramer in “The New York Times”, at the time the pieces were exhibited.

Frank Stella became known very early, at the age of 23, at an exhibition in 1959 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where he exhibited his black paintings with white symmetries. “A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella’s extraordinary, ever-evolving work explored the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and object,” said his New York representative, the Marianne Boesky Gallery, upon the announcement of the artist’s death,cited by the ARTNews website.