Famous painter and pioneer of minimalism Frank Stella dies at 87

Renowned minimalist painter Frank Stella died Saturday of lymphoma at his home in Manhattan, New York. The artist was 87 years old.

Stella's representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, confirmed the news to NPR.

“Marianne Boesky began representing Stella in 2014, and the gallery is deeply grateful for a decade of collaboration with the artist and her studio,” Boesky said in a statement. statement shared with NPR. “It has been a great honor to work with Frank over the past decade. His is a remarkable legacy and he will be missed.”

One of the most influential American artists of her time, Stella was a pioneer of the Minimalist movement of the early 1960s. During this era, painters and sculptors challenged the idea that art was supposed to be representational and used their medium as a message.

Instead of depicting three-dimensional worlds across the canvas, some of Stella's early works reflected her desire to have an immediate visual impact on viewers. A series called Black paints used parallel black stripes to create awareness of the painting as a two-dimensional surface. As Stella once said gnomically, “What you see is what you see.” »

“It was about being able to create an abstract painting which was in reality based on nothing other than the gesture of making oneself, which was the gesture of making the painting”, Stella Terry Gross in a Fresh air interview in 2000.

Frank Stella was born into a middle-class Italian-American family. Her father was a gynecologist who painted houses during the Great Depression and her mother was a housewife and artist. Young Stella grew up surrounded by paint; among his mother's works and helping his father whenever he painted his own house. “I always loved painting,” he told Gross, “for the physical aspect of it.”

He began exploring painting more professionally while in high school in Massachusetts under the supervision of abstractionist painter Patrick Morgan, who taught there. Even while studying history at Princeton, Stella continued to take art classes. Through his Ivy League connections, Stella was introduced to the New York art world, which began to shape his early artistic vision when he met artists such as Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, who would become one of his most admired influences.

“I really wanted more than anything to make art that was as good as good artists made it. I wanted to make that art one day and I didn't expect it to be that way right away, that it would be as good as [Willem] de Kooning or Kline or [Barnett] Newman or Pollock or [Mark] Rothko. They were my heroes and I wanted to create art that was as good as them,” he said. Fresh air.

When Stella was only 23, he made his debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And shortly after his series Black paints, which he started in 1958, Stella created two other series, Aluminum paints (1960) and Paintings on copper (1960-61), who committed himself to the idea that art was in the medium and was, like he said The Guardian in 2015supposed to be “fairly simple”.

In 1970, at the age of 33, Stella became the youngest artist to benefit from a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His exhibition covered a decade of his drawings and paintings and highlighted his originality in simplicity.

In the 1990s, Stella's work evolved from canvas to colorful geometric configurations and sculptures. He began using computer technology and architectural rendering to incorporate digital images into his work. Her Moby-Dick The series, a collection of paintings, lithographs and sculptures, takes its chapter titles from Herman Melville's classic novel. According to Princeton University Art Museumthe series was Stella's “most ambitious artistic effort… [that] pushes the boundaries between engraving, painting and sculpture.

A simple and rather direct artist, Stella never really cared what others thought of him or his art. But his six-decade career inspired generations of artists, including the painter Julie Mehretu. “Once I really started to understand his work and follow him, there was a certain type of invention and playfulness and extreme rigor with which he kept moving forward,” she says. said in an interview with NPR in 2015.

Stella's many awards and recognitions include the National Medal of Artsthe country's highest honor for artistic excellence, in 2009, and the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award in Contemporary Sculpture from the International Sculpture Center.

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