The American painter Frank Stellawho became a prominent figure in his country’s postwar art, especially with his early minimalist works, has died at age 87, media reported Saturday.
Stella died at her Manhattan home from lymphoma, according to TI have New York Times. According to his wife, Harriet McGurkthe cause of his death was lymphoma.
The painter born in Malden, Massachusetts, began his career making sober paintings, some with little color and no pretensions to providing visual stimulation, which contrasted with the abstract expressionism of the time.
His early works included a series of paintings using the “pinstriping” technique (large-format works with thin black lines on white canvas) that caused a sensation within the American art world.
As the diary recalls Washington Postfour of those works were included in the 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a group show in which Stella was the youngest artist.
Before he was 25, he was already recognized as one of the great American artists, and he continued his career for six decades. Despite the insistence of critics, Stella refused to interpret his work with a famous phrase: “What you see is what you see.”
Stella then explored color and form, occasionally painting irregular figures with geometric motifs. Towards the end of the 1960s she embarked on the ambitious ‘Protractor’ project, a series of large paintings composed of overlapping semicircles of bright colours.
Little given to explaining his works, in the following decades his work extended to sculpture and even design, with commissions from public and private entities, such as the one he did for the Los Angeles Gas Company Tower, in California.
In the 1970s and 1980s, he increasingly turned to three-dimensional works in which he incorporated aluminum and fiberglass, before making monumental sculptures for public spaces. The Museum of Modern Art in New York offered retrospectives of his work in 1970 and again in 1987.
Son of Frank and Constance Stella, he a gynecologist and she a landscape painter, Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936. After completing his history degree at Princeton, he got a studio in Manhattan, where, at the same time he painted houses , began working on his dark-toned paintings.
In 1961 he married Barbara Rose, who would become a renowned art critic and whom he divorced in 1969 (she died in 2020, according to The New York Times).
With her he had two children, Rachel and Michael, and with his next wife, McGurk, a pediatrician whom he married in 1978, he had two more, Patrick and Peter.
In addition to five grandchildren, he is also survived by Laura, a daughter he had from his relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse, with whom he was in the period between his two marriages.
With information from AFP and EFE
