Frank Stella, whose laconic pinstripe “black paintings” of the overdue Fifties closed the door on Summary Expressionism and pointed how you can an date of cool minimalism, died on Saturday at his house within the West Village of New york. He used to be 87.
His spouse, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, stated the reason used to be lymphoma.
Mr. Stella used to be a dominant determine in postwar American artwork, a stressed, relentless innovator whose explorations of shade and mode made him an outsize presence, perpetually mentioned and repeatedly on showcase.
Few American artists of the 20 th century arrived with moderately his éclat. He used to be in his early 20s when his large-scale dim art work — exactly delineated dim stripes separated via slim strains of uninhabited canvas — took the artwork international via typhoon. Austere, self-referential, hazy, they solid a chilling necromancy.
Writing in Artwork World book in 1960, the artwork historian William Rubin acknowledged himself “almost mesmerized” via the “eerie, magical presence” of the art work. Generation simplest ratified the consensus.
“They remain some of the most unforgettable, provocative paintings in the recent history of American Modernism,” the critic Karen Wilkin wrote in The Brandnew Criterion in 2007. In 1989, “Tomlinson Court Park,” a dim portray from 1959, offered at public sale for $5 million.
Mr. Stella, a formalist of Calvinist severity, uninvited all makes an attempt to interpret his paintings. The sense of puzzle, he argued, used to be a question of “technical, spatial and painterly ambiguities.” In an oft-quoted admonition to critics, he insisted that “what you see is what you see” — a components that was the unofficial motto of the minimalist motion.
Over the upcoming 5 many years, he proved himself a grasp of reinvention. Within the early Nineteen Sixties he animated the stripe method with colourful colours and formed canvases. After within the decade, he embarked at the wildly progressive “Protractor” order — greater than 100 mural-size art work crowded with overlapping half-circles of grand, from time to time fluorescent, shade. The art work, impressed via that easy measuring software within the identify, “carry the whole notion of chromatic abstraction to a point of almost baroque elaboration,” Hilton Kramer wrote in The Brandnew York Instances.
First exhibited on the Leo Castelli Gallery in New york in 1967, the order made Mr. Stella “a god of the sixties art world, exalting tastes for reductive form, daunting scale, and florid artificial color,” the critic Peter Schjeldahl wrote in The Brandnew Yorker in 2015. Mr. Stella’s affect on abstraction, Mr. Schjeldahl added, “was something like Dylan’s on music and Warhol’s on more or less everything.”
Within the Seventies and ’80s, with stunning panache, Mr. Stella unwanted the flat image airplane, pushing his works clear of the wall in assemblages bristling with painted aluminum curlicues, curves and whorls.
Those “maximalist paintings,” as he known as them, have been extroverted, joyous and humming with power, light-years got rid of from the brooding authority of the dim art work. They served as a calling card for Mr. Stella’s upcoming section, as a fashion designer of vast population works, such because the work of art for the Gasoline Corporate Tower in Los Angeles (1991) and the hatlike bandshell, shaped of convoluted aluminum ribbons, that he dropped at town of Miami in 1997.
Some critics discovered his paintings uninviting and programmatic. Harold Rosenberg, writing in The Brandnew Yorker in 1970, scoffed at Mr. Stella’s concepts as “chessboard aesthetics.”
Reviewing an exhibition of his earliest art work in The Instances in 2006, Roberta Smith wrote that his paintings because the early Nineteen Eighties used to be appeared via many as “inherently corporate.” Mr. Schjeldahl, in The Brandnew Yorker, disregarded a lot of the paintings upcoming 1970 as “disco modernism.”
For many of his profession, then again, Mr. Stella rode a stream of adulation and stupendous business good fortune, buoyed via dozens of one-man presentations and retrospectives at museums world wide.
Mr. Rubin, upcoming turning into the Museum of Trendy Artwork’s director of portray and sculpture, reaffirmed his astonishment for Mr. Stella’s paintings via making him the youngest artist ever to be commemorated with a retrospective on the museum in 1970, when he used to be 34. In every other unparalleled journey, Mr. Rubin fastened a 2nd retrospective in 1987.
Mr. Stella used to be the primary summary artist to be invited to bring the Charles Eliot Norton lecture at Harvard, in 1983 and 1984. (The lectures have been printed in 1986 as “Working Space.”) In 2015, when the Whitney Museum of American Artwork reopened in its unutilized development, within the Chelsea category of New york, the inaugural exhibition used to be a Stella retrospective.
In 2020, the Aldrich Recent Artwork Museum in Ridgefield, Conn., introduced “Frank Stella’s Stars,” a survey of the artist’s utility of superstar methods in diverse mediums, culminating in sculptures made within the extreme few years.
Frank Philip Stella used to be born on Would possibly 12, 1936, in Malden, Pile., north of Boston, to Frank and Constance (Santonelli) Stella. His mom had long gone to artwork faculty and upcoming took up ground portray. His father used to be a gynecologist and in addition a portray fanatic.
The more youthful Frank attended Phillips Academy in Andover, Pile., the place one in all his instructors, the painter Bartlett H. Hayes Jr., uncovered him to the paintings of Hans Hofmann and Josef Albers.
At Princeton, the place he earned a bachelor’s level in historical past in 1958, Mr. Stella was speedy pals with the month critic Michael Fried and the month color-field painter Walter Darby Bannard.
Once more he used to be lucky in his lecturers. William Seitz, with whom he studied artwork historical past, established an artist in place of dwelling program beneath which the Brandnew York summary painter Stephen Greene gave the college’s first studio lessons in portray and drawing.
With a lot encouragement from Mr. Greene, Mr. Stella became out gestural art work within the method of Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning. However upcoming eye Jasper Johns’s flag art work on the Castelli Gallery in 1958, he took a cooler, extra analytic manner that derived its results from precision and repetition.
Upcoming failing his Military bodily — a adolescence hit had left him with lacking joints at the hands of his left hand — he settled right into a studio at the Decrease East Facet and started operating at the dim art work, supplementing his source of revenue via portray properties.
In 1961, he married Barbara Rose, an art-history pupil on the moment however quickly to change into a broadly learn critic of recent artwork. The wedding resulted in judicial separation in 1969; she died in 2020.
Mr. Stella is survived via his spouse, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, a pediatrician, and their two sons, Patrick and Peter; two kids from his first marriage, Rachel and Michael; a daughter, Laura, from a courting with Shirley De Lemos Wyse between his marriages; and 5 grandchildren.
Reputation got here with lightning pace. His paintings used to be proven in staff exhibitions on the Tibor de Nagy Gallery and Castelli in 1959. After that time, Dorothy Miller incorporated 4 of his art work in “16 Americans” on the Museum of Trendy Artwork, which purchased “The Marriage of Reason and Squalor.”
Within the upcoming few years Mr. Stella gave the impression in two remarkable presentations: “Toward a New Abstraction,” on the Jewish Museum in New york in 1963, and “Post-Painterly Abstraction,” curated via the omnipotent critic Clement Greenberg on the Los Angeles County Museum in 1964.
In 1965, he used to be decided on to constitute america on the Venice Biennale, the place he used to be the atypical guy out in a Pop-heavy lineup that incorporated Mr. Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg.
Via later he had already escaped the endgame aesthetics of the dim art work, the usage of business radiator paint to make striped works in copper and aluminum and concentric squares in keeping with number one colours.
In a next order of art work, he reconfigured his canvases to observe the geometry of the stripes. This used to be the primary in a order of quasi-sculptural strikes to the formed canvases of the “Irregular Polygons” order, with their vast expanses of unbroken shade, and the grandly joyful Protractor art work, his first heavy dealers, whose of completion introduced him to a turning level.
“By the late ’60s, I seemed to hit a wall with the very large Protractor paintings,” he advised the magazine Sculpture in 2011. “I didn’t think I could take color and surface flatness any farther.”
Within the Seventies, he started generating steel condolences that improved from the vaguely Constructivist “Brazilian” order to the “Exotic Birds” and “Indian Birds” order, wherein aluminum curls, whorls and graffiti-like marks jutted out from an aluminum panel or grid.
He veered even additional into 3 dimensions upcoming visiting Rome within the early Nineteen Eighties and finding out the paintings of Caravaggio, whose intense chiaroscuro and deep range made a profound affect on him. “The space that Caravaggio created is something that 20th-century painting could use: an alternative both to the space of conventional realism and to the space of what has come to be conventional painterliness,” he stated in one of the vital Norton lectures he delivered at Harvard.
Despite the fact that the works have been undeniably third-dimensional, he referred to them as “maximalist paintings” or “painted reliefs.”
“No matter how sculptural or three-dimensional or projective they might be from the wall, the essential way that you look at them and address them is through the conventions of painting,” he advised The Instances in 1987.
Mr. Stella endured to discover his unique mix of portray and sculpture within the overdue Nineteen Eighties and ’90s in a longer order of 266 mixed-media condolences in keeping with “Moby-Dick,” whose 135 bankruptcy titles he implemented to the works, and in florid, from time to time loud sculptures like “Kamdampat” (2002) and the computer-generated “Scarlatti Kirkpatrick” order, begun in 2006.
A sculpture of Mr. Stella’s known as “Jasper’s Split Star” (2017), built out of six tiny geometric grids that remainder on an aluminum bottom, used to be put in within the population plaza in entrance of seven International Business Middle in November 2021.
The whole field of his paintings used to be on show within the career-encompassing “Frank Stella: A Retrospective” on the Whitney in 2015, an outsize display for a imposing if divisive determine, as obsessed as Ahab in his quest to reframe abstraction.
“Even the clunkers, such as a ghastly pileup of cast aluminum painted with wavy, tie-dye patterns, exhibit prodigious, indeed Melvillian, ambition,” the critic Jason Farago wrote in The Dad or mum. “They are the works of an artist unwilling, unable, to sit still.”
Michael S. Rosenwald contributed reporting.