Frank Stella 1936, Malden, MA, USA-2024, West Village, NY, USA

He studied painting at Phillips Academy in Andover and Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958, where he encountered the works of Jackson Pollock, Jasper Johns, and Hans Hofmann—an experience that deeply influenced his early practice.

Stella’s breakthrough came with the Black Paintings (1958–60), a series of monochromatic canvases marked by precise pinstriped bands that prefigured Minimalism. These works garnered immediate critical acclaim and were featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans (1959), alongside Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. MoMA’s founding director, Alfred Barr, acquired four of Stella’s paintings for the museum’s permanent collection.

In 1960, Stella presented his Aluminum Paintings in his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York, followed by his international debut at Galerie Lawrence in Paris in 1961. By the mid-1960s, he had turned to printmaking, transforming the medium through radical innovations in form, color, and process. Stella’s emphasis on the painting as an autonomous object—rather than a window onto illusion—became one of the defining ideas of postwar abstraction.

In 1970, at the age of thirty-four, Stella became the youngest artist to receive a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, a rare honor that was followed by a second MoMA retrospective in 1987.

Throughout the 1970s, Stella moved beyond the flatness of the canvas, developing what he termed “maximalist” painting—works that merged the pictorial and the sculptural through relief and projection. Using materials such as wood, aluminum, and fiberglass, he transformed the painted surface into a dynamic structure that occupied real space. These compositions, characterized by bold geometry and vivid color, marked a decisive shift from the restraint of Minimalism toward a more spatial and experiential form of abstraction.