Frank Stella

The art world mourns the loss of Frank Stella, an iconic figure whose bold innovations helped to transform the landscape of modern art. He passed away age 87 on 4 May 2024 at his home in Manhattan, New York, United States of America.

As a young man in 1959, Frank Stella shocked the American art world with his contribution to the exhibition, Sixteen Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. For this occasion, many of the other exhibitors had produced pallid versions of Abstract Expressionism – the current fashion amongst the avant-garde. This later generation of exponents, however, lacked the power and audacity of originators, such as Jackson Pollock, and instead produced feeble-mannered afterthoughts. Stella, in contrast, exhibited four large powerful canvases from his Black paintings series, consisting of the simple forms of black brushstrokes. Of this new approach, Stella commented later “What you see is what you see”[1], which would become a mantra for a minimalist new style. By introducing such distilled forms into his vocabulary, Stella became a harbinger of a newly evolving style of Minimalism.

While some artists proceeded to explore minimal ideas, Stella became concerned with the lack of potential in this new minimal style and with its inherent logical dead end. He began to explore the relationship of geometric forms and colour as important elements of his compositions, as evident in the 1970 painting Flin Flon, National Gallery of Australia. Instead, Stella embraced new ways of depiction, innovative ideas about subject matter, and new ways of construction. He chose to blur the distinctions between art forms, introducing ideas of shaped canvases, painted sculpture, or sculptural painting, and a daring exploration of the potential of printmaking.

In this last art form, he worked with his longtime friend and collaborator, master printer and publisher, Ken Tyler. Over four decades, artist and printer developed a collaborative method that began with Stella creating collages, one of the important inventions of the twentieth century, by drawing from existing proofs and recycling new matrices from old components or new constructions. In doing so they broke many of the traditional printmaking boundaries, developing a cacophony of printing elements, including recycling offcuts from the studio floor to construct matrices. From this collaboration, Stella was able to create prints on a massive scale, with groundbreaking papermaking, including the pursuit of the third dimension. A rich collection of these works is now held at the National Gallery of Australia in the Kenneth E Tyler Collection, with accompanying documentation in its extraordinary archive. Many of these works will be featured in a forthcoming three volume publication, Tyler Graphics: catalogue raisonné 1986–2001.

Stella was well-grounded in the history of western art and applied his knowledge to his own analysis of current American art, where Abstraction had provided the backbone of American avant-garde art since mid- 20th century. He was concerned that it had lost its power and currency. Since he was a young man, Stella had understood the importance of learning from earlier masters and kept images of their works in his studio for inspiration, looking to the past for a solution to the deadening weight of contemporary lacklustre versions of abstraction. The art of the Late Renaissance, in his view, had faltered under the sway of the emerging exciting and dynamic Baroque period. It became Stella’s belief, which he outlined in lectures at Harvard and later published in Working Space, The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1983-84, that modern art needed to develop a comparable new direction.

Stella noted that while some commentators had linked abstraction with Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock, and others with Titian and Velázquez, he contended that present-day abstraction lacked legitimate artistic ancestry. Except for Cubism, it was cut off from Western pictorial tradition and had little pictorial history, and a limited future. Stella compared late abstraction to the closing years of Renaissance art, as exemplified by Nicholas Poussin’s work, which he characterised as a ‘tepid’ and a ‘slug of lead’. For Stella, ‘the current prospects for abstraction seem terribly narrowed; its sense of space appears shallow and constricted.’[1] There was nowhere to go. Stella’s quest to save abstraction, fuelled by his desire to avoid the fate of the Late Renaissance and passion to ‘fill the void’ as the Italian Baroque artist Caravaggio had done, took him on a remarkable journey.

Throughout the 1980s, Stella sought to develop a new sense of space, breaking out of the picture plane with a tangible sense of movement and tonal contrast. Overtime, his art came to be characterised by working on a grand scale, with the inclusion of new textures and adoption of a bolder palette, evident in later works like The Fountain 1992 and the Imaginary Places series 1994–98. He also introduced a narrative element to abstraction by rejecting the then favoured norm of ‘Untitled’ compositions, instead using titles to enhance his works; providing a synthesis of imagery and story, including references to ideas, stories, or cultures. Through this synthesis, Stella aimed to produce abstract narratives which characterised much of his later art, including his 135 works inspired by the chapters of Moby Dick. These works optimised his curious nature, breaking boundaries of medium, scale and genre. Many of his earlier devotees who so admired his youthful minimal style were horrified, as evident in the uncomprehending reviews of Stella’s 2015 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Like the reception of Baroque art in its day, it may take time for Stella’s mature style to be widely appreciated.

Throughout his longstanding career Stella was like an acrobatic adventurer on a highwire act who embraced the intoxicating challenge of taking a risk. In this indomitable way, he contributed in a major way in the evolution of modern art. His bold spirit will be greatly missed by his family and artistic community, but his innovations will not be forgotten.

Dr Jane Kinsman, Kenneth E Tyler Distinguished Adjunct Curator, Prints and Drawings.