NEW YORK Operations on his back, knee and hip in recent years had limited his mobility, but not the spirit of his twenties that led him to challenge himself as an octogenarian with the unstoppable creativity he had within. Multifaceted and famous for never wanting to interpret his works, Frank Stella, who transported the American art of the post-war period from abstract expressionism to minimalism, died of lymphoma at the age of 87 in his home in Greenwich Village in Manhattan. Faithful to the maxim of “what you see is what you see” and to the belief that a painting was “a flat surface with paint on it, nothing more”, Stella did not betray himself even when in 2015 the Whitney awarded him dedicated the inaugural retrospective after moving to the High Line. There was a six-decade career to tell, a vast production of over 3,000 works in constant reinvention, starting from the monumental symmetries and the Black Paintings of the late 1950s (he was just 23 years old, fresh from graduating in history from Princeton), then his participation in the American pavilion at the 1965 Venice Biennale, the only minimalist in a catwalk of pop art stars from Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg. First exhibited by Leo Castelli in 1967, the protractor-inspired Protactor series – 100 monumental paintings with overlapping semicircles of fluorescent colors each named after circular cities visited in the Middle East – made him “an art world god” on the scale of a Bob Dylan for music or Andy Warhol, as he later wrote the New Yorker. In 1970, at just 33 years old, Stella was the youngest artist to merit a retrospective at MoMA. The sculpture-paintings of the 70s and 80s – passionate about car racing, in 1976 he had painted a BMW competing at Le Mans which gave rise to The Circuits series of the following decade – had then paved the way for large art commissions public such as the murals for the Gas Company Tower in Los Angeles in 1991. In 1982 a stay at the American Academy in Rome led him to study Caravaggio: “20th century painting could learn a lot from him,” he said two years later at a conference at Harvard. That year, precisely at Harvard, Stella had met Italo Calvino: the Cones and Pillars series – Giufa’ and the Plaster Statue, The Fool Without Fear, Body Without the Soul – borrowed its titles from Italian fairy tales. Middle class Italian-American from Massachusetts – his father, a gynecologist of Syracuse origin who had painted houses during the Great Depression, his mother Constance, an amateur painter from Calabria – Stella had grown up surrounded by painting. An artist who continually rewrote the rules, experimenting and reinventing himself, Frank “smelled” trends, as in the 1960s, for the Benjamin Moore series, which took the name of a famous brand of interior paint, a decade later with the colors of disco music that inspired his palette, then, in the 1980s, graffiti, more recently with the new technologies from which intricate computer-generated metal and latex creations and gigantic monochrome stars were born, one of which was installed in 2021 in front of the no. 7 of the World Trade Center. (Handle)
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