Frank Stella’s iconic legacy continues to stand strong despite his sad passing earlier this year. Known for his abstract geometric shapes, Stella influenced a great number of contemporary artists in encouraging them to push the bounds of our perceptions of art. One of the main concepts he strives to represent is drawing our attention to the flatness and two dimensionality of the canvas. This goes against the art historical traditions of illusionism since the Renaissance as in history the canvas has become something for an artist to make a window from, for us to view and understand a different time or place. Stella’s minimalist style goes against the use of the canvas for distortion and deception, and he instead celebrates its surface and its limits of representation.
A Stella Career Through The Dimensions
Frank Stella’s parents had come to New York from Italy and had sent him to Phillips Academy in Andover, which some might compare to a kind of local Eton where he received art lessons before going on to attain a BA in history at Princeton in 1958. After this he moved to New York, becoming a house painter, having been trained by his father. Although greatly influencing Andy Warhol in this period, Stella was not a pop artist as he did not use his household paints and brushes to make a statement about popular culture, instead he used them for their familiarity.
In 1959 at the age of 23, Stella created one of his more notable and renowned works, ‘Die Fahne Hoch!’ This wholly minimalist, abstract work is one of twenty four black paintings that kicked off Stella’s fame in his earlier years. What appear to be thin white lines, are rather small segments of the unprimed, bare canvas that he leaves open for the viewer to acknowledge that this is a two dimensional surface, and it is really just paint on a canvas. Stella famously declared about this painting that “What you see is what you see.” The social interpretations of this painting span a breadth but it is important to note that the title translates as “hoist the flag” from the Nazi Party’s marching anthem and the painting’s cross shape could call to mind the annihilation of the Holocaust, creating dichotomies on the canvas of positive and negative space, monochromatic colour, and emptiness. So successful were these works, that in 1970 at age 33 Stella became the youngest artist ever to be given a MoMA retrospective exhibition.
Despite following this rigid attraction to highlighting the canvas’s flatness, in the 80s and 90s, Frank Stella broke free of these confinements completely as we can see in his ‘La scienza della fiacca (4x)’ 1984. It creates a new kind of illusive depth that rallies against the traditional confines of the 2D canvas surface.
Intellectual Legacies
Over the years, Frank Stella’s art has been celebrated in numerous retrospectives held across the United States, Europe, and Japan, underscoring his international influence and testament to his transformative influence on modern and contemporary art. His work has been showcased in countless retrospectives across the United States, Europe, and Japan. From early exhibitions like The Shaped Canvas (1964–65) and Systemic Painting (1966) at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Stella helped redefine the possibilities of abstract art.
Among the many honours he has received, one of the most distinguished was his invitation from Harvard University to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1983–84. In these six lectures, Stella advocated for a revitalisation of abstraction, aspiring to capture the profound depth characteristic of Baroque painting. This vision wasn’t just an academic exercise but rather a call to action for artists to push the boundaries of abstraction, to influence and inspire a new generation of contemporary artists.
Buying and Selling Stella’s Works
Stella’s works permeate the secondary art market in a varied set of limited edition prints ranging from monochrome geometric shapes such as ‘Hyena Stomp’ all the way to the other end of the colour spectrum with ‘Pergusa Three Double’. There is endless demand for the breadth and depth of Stella’s unique works and prints that buyers are waiting to find so enquire today for a free valuation here.
