Famous painter Frank Stella passed away on Saturday at his home in Manhattan, New York. He was 87 years old. His representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York, confirmed the sad news to NPR.
Frank Stella was well-known for his minimalist style of painting. Minimalism means using very simple shapes, colors, and lines in art. It’s about keeping things really simple and not adding too much detail.
Stella’s work was loved by many because of its clean and straightforward style. He had a unique way of creating art that made people stop and think.
Unfortunately, Stella lost his battle with lymphoma, which is a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system in the body. Despite his illness, he continued to create beautiful art until the end. There is another celebrity died today in USA.
His passing is a loss to the art world, but his legacy will live on through his remarkable paintings.
Marianne Boesky, who started representing Stella in 2014, shared a statement with NPR expressing gratitude for their decade-long collaboration with the artist and his studio. “It has been a great honor to work with Frank for this past decade. His is a remarkable legacy, and he will be missed,” Boesky said.
Frank Stella was one of the most influential American artists of his time. He played a key role in the minimalist movement of the early 1960s. Back then, artists were challenging the idea that art had to look like something specific. Instead, they used simple shapes, colors, and forms to express themselves. Stella was at the forefront of this movement, using his art to convey powerful messages without relying on realistic images.
In his early artworks, Frank Stella didn’t aim to show three-dimensional worlds on his canvas. Instead, he wanted his art to immediately catch people’s eyes. One series he created, called the Black Paintings, used parallel black stripes. These stripes made you notice that the painting was flat, not 3D. Stella famously said, “What you see is what you see.”
One of Stella’s famous paintings from 1959 is called “Die Fahne hoch!” It’s part of a series that made him well-known in the 1950s. He wanted to make abstract paintings that didn’t represent anything specific, but focused on the act of painting itself. Stella explained this idea in a 2000 interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air.
Frank Stella was born into a middle-class Italian American family. His dad was a doctor who painted houses when times were tough in the Great Depression, and his mom stayed at home, also being an artist. Stella grew up surrounded by paint, with his mom’s artworks around and helping his dad with painting jobs at home. “I always liked paint,” he said, talking about how much he enjoyed working with it.
Even in high school in Massachusetts, Stella drawn to painting. He had the chance to learn from an abstract painter named Patrick Morgan who taught there. Even when he went to Princeton for college and studied history, he kept taking art classes. Through his connections at Princeton, he got to know the art scene in New York City. Meeting artists like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline influenced his early artistic vision a lot.
“I really wanted more than anything to make art that was as good as the good artists were making. I wanted to make art that someday and I didn’t expect it to happen 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 make art that was as good as theirs,” he told Fresh Air.
When Frank Stella was just 23, he had his first art show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Right after his famous Black Paintings series, which he began in 1958, Stella went on to create two more series called Aluminum Paintings (1960) and Copper Paintings (1960-61). He believed that the real art was in the materials themselves, and he wanted his art to be simple and easy to understand.
In 1970, at the age of 33, Stella became the youngest artist ever to have a big exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit showed off his drawings and paintings from the past ten years and focused on how he made his art so unique by keeping it simple.
In the 1990s, Stella’s art changed. He started making colorful shapes and sculptures instead of just painting on canvas. He even started using computers and architectural designs to add digital images to his work. One of his most famous series during this time called the Moby Dick series. The paintings, lithographs, and sculptures in this series named after chapters from Herman Melville’s famous book. It was his biggest project yet and showed how he was always trying new things in his art.
Frank Stella known for being straightforward and not caring much about what people thought of him or his art. But his career, which spanned six decades, inspired many artists, including painter Julie Mehretu. She said in a 2015 NPR interview that once she really started to understand his work, she appreciated the creativity, playfulness, and extreme dedication he brought to his art.
Stella received many awards and honors throughout his life. In 2009, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts, which is the highest honor in the United States for artistic excellence. Then in 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center. These recognitions showed just how much his contributions to art were valued and celebrated by others.
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