Eight days before his 88th birthday, Frank Stella, one of the central names in the American canon, died of leukemia in New York on Saturday. Born in Maiden, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, to a family of Italian immigrants, he learned the basics of the craft at the Phillips Academy in Andover, the same state where Barnett H. Hayes discovered Hans Hoffmann and Albers. As a student at Princeton, thanks to his art history professor William C. Seitz and his painting teacher Stephen Greene, he met his future colleague Walter Darby Bannard and discovered abstract expressionism.
When he moved to Manhattan, where he soon suffered under the influence of Jasper Johns and came into contact with the great art dealer Leo Castelli, he began to break with the inheritance he had received. His “Black Paintings” from the late fifties and early sixties have nothing to do with those of Goya in the Quinta del Sordo or with the almost Goyesque black of El Paso. And yes, with the black ones by Albers or Ad Reinhardt and with the search for repeating structures. In the realm of silence, these geometric paintings, which pioneered minimalism, still had a strong visual presence. As early as 1976, when less than twenty years had passed, the Baltimore Museum of Art dedicated an exhibition to the series.
In Europe, his first solo performance took place in 1961 at Lawrence Rubin’s Paris gallery. That year he had married Barbara Rose and for professional reasons they lived in our city: see his painting “New Madrid”. Using materials such as aluminum, irregular contours (the “Shaped Canvases,” which he exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in 1964), and bright colors, he began his first reinvention as a painter. His work shone in the minimalist traveling exhibition “The Art of the Real” at the MoMA in New York, which this chronicler saw during his stopover in Paris in 1969. Shortly afterwards he experienced a renewed interest in his engravings at Kasmin in London and read Robert Rosenblum’s groundbreaking monograph, published in Penguin in 1971. The year before, William Rubin had dedicated a retrospective to him at MoMA, where he stayed in 1978 and returned in 1987.
Later, in a new pirouette, Stella reinvented herself again: as a baroque painter, a friend of instability, distraction, complexity and contradiction and of penetrating the field of three-dimensionality. There were quite a few critics, and not a few who didn’t follow him on this path. In a cruel formula, Peter Schjeldahl even went so far as to describe him as a cultivator of “disco painting.” Instead, pattern painting cultivators would say so. An exhibitor in major museums around the world, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Reina Sofía in 1995 and in 2011 his monumental mural with Santiago Calatrava, inspired by a story by Kleist, was presented at the IACC Pablo Serrano in Zaragoza.
