Frank Stella, an artist widely regarded as the trailblazer and well-respected innovator of the abstract expressionism movement famous for his 1950s "Black Paintings," passed away Saturday, May 4.
According to The New York Times, Stella had been battling lymphoma right until his death at his home in the West Village of Manhattan last weekend, citing his wife Dr. Harriet E. McGurk for the news.
The abstract expressionist is among many of those who rose to prominence after the postwar years. However, he is one of the few who stuck out, especially following his bare paintings that were made as a riposte to the movement.
Famously, he is quoted for his admonition to the critics against his work, where he said: "What you see is what you see."
The Expansive Influence of Frank Stella's Career
In the 1950s and '60s, Stella would redefine what it means to paint and how paintings are perceived time and time again, but his most subversive move was when he took up a zero-degree approach to abstraction.
By then, his paintings became maximal and were a lot more eye-catching due to the vibrant combinations of hues he would often express through shimmering patterns. He would also produce shaped canvases that broke through the medium's four-sided confines at this time.
Essentially, he transitioned to the realm of sculpture, and through the decades, his art has adapted to this form-heavy approach and slowly became larger as consecutive works were produced.
Often made from unconventional and "brutalist" materials like steel and fiberglass, Stella leaned in on trying to bombard the senses of his would-be viewers by using dichotomous design themes that are both garish and beautiful.
From the 1960s until recent times, the critics' views of Stella's art have turned positive for the most part. That said, his work has always been considered important in the grand scheme of American art history. He was even recognized through a 2015 retrospective at New York's Whitney Museum.
Show curator Adam Weinberg wrote in its catalog that Stella's best qualities were "his impulsiveness, willingness to take risks, desire to be separated from the group, and to do things his own way."
"A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella's extraordinary, perpetually evolving oeuvre investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objecthood," wrote Marianne Boesky Gallery, the artist's long-time NY representative.
