He would have turned 88 in a few days, on May 12th. With Frank Stella passing away on Saturday 4 May in New York, in his home in the West Village, due to lymphoma, one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century passes away, certainly one of the great masters of minimalism. Born in Malden, Massachusetts, on May 12, 1936 to a couple of Italian origins (his father Frank, a gynecologist; his mother Constance Aida Santonelli, a housewife who had attended a design school) Frank Philip Stella is best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in the creation of paintings and sculptures (starting from the 1990s he also began to experiment in the field of architecture, which he had already come into contact with in the 1950s while working in Richard Meier’s studio). In his works Stella used form, color and composition «to explore — according to critics — non-literary narratives», as seen in his work Harrar II (1967) series Protractor.
After completing his studies at the Phillips Academy in Andover (Massachusetts) and Princeton University, he settled in New York (1958) where, in contact with the exponents of the new abstraction (Kenneth Noland, Ellsworth Kelly), he had engaged in rigorously geometric research (The Marriage of Reason and Squalor, 1959, New York, Museum of Modern Art). A research that would have allowed him to develop shaped canvases, creating complex chromatic games (Sanbornville II, 1966, Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum). «Recovering – again according to the critics – also the pictorial dimension» Stella (to whom in 2009 US President Barack Obama awarded the National Medal of Arts) has thus arrived, with unprecedented freedom of expression, at complex three-dimensional structures, often of monumental format, which use heterogeneous materials such as felt, wood, aluminium, recycled elements, metallic or fluorescent paints (The Moby Dick Deckle Edges Series, 1993; the decorations for the new Princess of Wales theater in Toronto, 1993). In 2001 one of his monumental sculptures was installed outside the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
A few months ago, in March, Stella (married from 1961 to 1969 to the art historian Barbara Rose with whom he had two children, Rachel and Michael; in 1978 he then married the pediatrician Harriet McGurk with whom he had two other children, Peter and Patrick) had inaugurated a new solo show at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York (Recent Sculpture open until May 18th). Where this minimalist artist by definition (works by Miró and Hockney in his private collection) had given life to five large sculptures created (in his studio in the Hudson Valley) using new technologies, proof of his contemporaneity evergreen.
