Frank Stella

Jasper's Dilemma (1962-1963) at the National Gallery of Art in 2022

Upon moving to New York City, he began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object.

Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more". [citation needed]

Die Fahne Hoch! (1959) takes its name ("The Raised Banner" in English) from the first line of the Horst-Wessel-Lied, the anthem of the National Socialist German Workers Party, and Stella pointed out that it is in the same proportions as banners used by that organization. [citation needed]

In 1959, several of his paintings were included in "Three Young Americans" at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, as well as in "Sixteen Americans" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (1960). [citation needed]

From 1960 his works used shaped canvases later developing into more elaborate designs, in the Irregular Polygon series (67), for example. [citation needed]

Later he began his Protractor Series (71) of paintings, in which arcs, sometimes overlapping, within square borders named after circular cities he had visited while in the Middle East earlier in the 1960s. [citation needed]

Frank Stella Harran II, 1967

In 1967, Stella designed the set and costumes for Scramble, a dance piece by Merce Cunningham. [citation needed]

The Museum of Modern Art in New York presented a retrospective of Stella's work in 1970, making him the youngest artist to receive one.[8]

During the following decade, Stella introduced relief, which he came to call "maximalist" painting for its sculptural qualities. [citation needed] After introducing wood and other materials in the Polish Village series (1973), his Minimalism became baroque. In 1976, Stella was commissioned by BMW to paint a BMW 3.0 CSL for the second installment in the BMW Art Car Project. He said of this project, "The starting point for the art cars was racing livery. The graph paper is what it is, a graph, but when it's morphed over the car's forms it becomes interesting. Theoretically it's like painting on a shaped canvas."[9]

In 1969, Stella was commissioned to create a logo for the Metropolitan Museum of Art Centennial.[10]

Frank Stella La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness), 1984, oil paint, enamel paint, and alkyd paint on canvas, etched magnesium, aluminum and fiberglass, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

Stella's Memantra, 2005, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Frank Stella in 2012

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, Stella created a large body of work that responded in a general way to Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.[11] To create these works, the artist used collages or maquettes that were then enlarged and re-created by assistants[11] (eg. La scienza della pigrizia (The Science of Laziness), from 1984). [citation needed]

In 1993, he created the entire decorative scheme for Toronto’s Princess of Wales Theatre, which includes a 10,000-square-foot mural. [citation needed] In 1997, he oversaw the installation of the 5,000-square-foot "Stella Project" at the Moores Opera House at the Rebecca and John J. Moores School of Music at the University of Houston, in Houston, TX.[12][13] His aluminum bandshell, inspired by a folding hat from Brazil, was built in downtown Miami in 2001. [citation needed] A monumental Stella sculpture was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. [citation needed]

Stella's Scarlatti K Series was triggered by the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.[14]

From 1978 to 2005, Stella owned the Van Tassell and Kearney Horse Auction Mart building in Manhattan's East Village and used it as his studio which resulted in the facade being restored.[15] After a six-year campaign by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, in 2012 the historic building was designated a New York City Landmark.[16] After 2005, Stella split his time between his West Village apartment and his Newburgh, New York studio.[17]

By the turn of the 2010s, Stella started using the computer as a painterly tool to produce stand-alone star-shaped sculptures.[18] The resulting stars are often monochrome, black or beige or naturally metallic, and their points can take the form of solid planes, spindly lines or wire-mesh circuits.[18] His Jasper’s Split Star (2017), a sculpture constructed out of six small geometric grids that rest on an aluminum base, was installed at 7 World Trade Center in 2021.[19]

• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, "The Shaped Canvas," New York, NY, December 9–January 3, 1964
• Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella," New York, NY, March 26–May 31, 1970
• Phillips Collection, "Frank Stella," Washington, D.C., November 3–December 2, 1973
• Baltimore Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: The Black Paintings," Baltimore, MD, November 23, 1976 – January 23, 1977
• Fort Worth Art Museum, "Stella Since 1970," Fort Worth, TX, March 19–April 30, 1978
• The Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella: The Indian Bird Maquettes," New York, NY, March 12–May 1, 1979
• Jewish Museum (Manhattan), "Frank Stella. Polish Wooden Synagogues –Constructions from the 1970s," New York, NY, February 9–May 1, 1983
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "Resource / Response / Reservoir. Stella Survey 1959-1982," San Francisco, CA, March 10–May 1, 1983
• Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museum, "Frank Stella: Selected Works," Cambridge, MA, December 7, 1983 – January 26, 1984
• The Museum of Modern Art, "Frank Stella: 1970-1987," New York, NY, October 10, 1987 – January 5, 1988
• Waddington Galleries, "Frank Stella," London, UK, March 29–April 20, 2000
• San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, "What You See Is What You See: Frank Stella and the Anderson Collection at SFMOMA," San Francisco, CA, June 11–September 6, 2004
• Arthur M. Sackler Museum, Harvard Art Museums, "Frank Stella 1958," Cambridge, MA, February 4–May 7, 2006
• Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture," New York, NY, May 1–July 19, 2007
• Neue Nationalgalerie, "Stella & Calatrava. The Michael Kohlhass Curtain," Berlin, Germany, April 15–August 14, 2011
• The Phillips Collection, "Stella Sounds: The Scarlatti K Series," Washington, D.C., June 11 –September 4, 2011
• Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, "Frank Stella. The Retrospective. Works 1958-2012," Wolfsburg, Germany, September 8, 2012 – January 20, 2013
• Royal Academy of Arts, Annenberg Courtyard, "Inflated Star and Wood Star," London, UK, February 18–May 17, 2015
• Whitney Museum of American Art, "Frank Stella: A Retrospective," New York, NY, October 30, 2015 – February 7, 2016
• POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, "Frank Stella and the Synagogues of Old Poland," Warsaw, Poland, February 18–June 20, 2016
• NSU Museum of Art Fort Lauderdale, "Frank Stella: Experiment and Change," Fort Lauderdale, FL, November 11, 2017 – July 29, 2018
• Los Angeles County Museum of Art, "Frank Stella: Selection from the Permanent Collection," Los Angeles, CA, May 5–September 2, 2019
• Marianne Boesky Gallery, "Frank Stella: Recent Work," New York, NY, April 25–May 31, 2019
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "Heads or Tails (1988), Cambridge, MA, permanent display[26]