Frank Stella (b. 1936)
American painter and printmaker Frank Stella graduated from the Phillips Academy, Andover in 1954 and Princeton University in 1958. While at Princeton, he studied painting under William Seitz and Stephen Greene. In 1958, he moved to New York and produced a series of paintings influenced by Jasper Johns’ Flags and Targets paintings. Three of his Black paintings were included in the 1959 exhibition Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art. In the 1960s, Stella began painting concentric squares, strips, and large geometric motifs in bright color, often on irregularly shaped canvases. He later developed complex three-dimensional relief paintings that blur the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Stella’s long and distinguished exhibition history included a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art and features inclusion in Documenta 4, 1968 and Documenta 6, 1977. The Charles Eliot Norton lectures (1983-84), which he gave at Harvard on Caravaggio, were published as the influential book Working Space, 1986. A major exhibition of Stella’s work was held at the Musea Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid and the Haus de Kunst, Munich in 1995. Stella lives and works in New York.