Frank Stella: Austere and Monumental

Frank Stella - Harran II - 1967 - Polymer and fluorescent polymer paint on canvas - 10 x 20 feet (304.8 x 609.6 cm) - The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York (click photo for larger image)American Artist Frank Stella (born 1936) is best known for his achievements in Minimalist art and Post-Painterly Abstraction.

In 1959, Frank Stella was one of those rare artists who gained early, immediate recognition in his career with black striped paintings that turned the gestural brushwork and existential angst of Abstract Expressionism upside down. “Focusing on the formal elements of art-making, Stella went on to create increasingly complicated work that seemed to follow a natural progression of dynamism, tactility, and scale: first, by expanding his initial monochrome palette to bright colors, and, later, moving painting into the third dimension through the incorporation of other, non-painterly elements onto the canvas. He ultimately went on to create large-scale freestanding sculptures, architectural structures, and the most complex work ever realized in the medium of printmaking. Stella's virtually relentless experimentation has made him a key figure in American modernism.” (The ArtStory)

Modern art historian and critic Clement Greenberg famously said, "Where the Old Masters created an illusion of space into which one could imagine walking, the illusion created by a Modernist is one into which one can look, can travel through, only with the eye." The significance of flatness, the integrity of the picture plane, and the optical integrity that Greenberg noted as being essential to modern art derived from the work of Stella and other modernists of the time. Stella's ideas also inspired other major theorists of the period.

Dr. Jill will be holding an online single-session program on Frank Stella. Click HERE for info and to Register.