#Frank stella series

It would appear slightly reflective and slightly hard and metallic.' Again he adopted a pattern of thin stripes achieved by applying lines of metallic paint separated by strips of raw canvas left in reserve. He used commercial silver radiator paint, because, as Stella recalled, 'you couldn't penetrate it, both literally and, I suppose, visually.

Stella's first one-person exhibition in New York, held at the Leo Castelli Gallery in September 1960, featured his next major series, his Aluminum paintings. Because Stella's Black Paintings seemed so radically anti-expressionistic, they were among the most controversial works, and the resulting publicity helped catapult Stella to fame. During the summer of 1959 Stella showed the paintings both to Leo Castelli, who asked him to join his gallery, and Dorothy Miller, who invited him to participate in her 'Sixteen Americans' exhibition opening that December at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Through his eradication of color and insistence on patterning and nonrelational symmetry, Stella sought to remove from his compositions any spatial references, explaining in a 1960 lecture at the Pratt Institute that 'the solution I arrived at forces illusionistic space out of the painting at constant intervals by using a regulated pattern.' He added, 'The remaining problem was simply to find a method of paint application which followed and complemented the design solution,' which for him was housepainter's techniques and tools. He used commercial enamel paint in a design of thin black stripes separated by strips of unpainted canvas.

#Frank stella series

He worked as a house painter a few days a week, making just enough money to support himself while he painted as an artist.īy late 1958 Stella had embarked on his now famous Black Paintings series (1958–January 1960), his response to the pictorial challenges presented by Jasper Johns's target and flag paintings, which he had seen earlier that year in January. The summer after graduation, Stella moved to New York City, settling in a storefront studio on the Lower East Side, then in a loft on West Broadway. While there he studied with the renowned art historian William Seitz and artist in residence Stephen Greene, both of whom had a decisive effect on the artist's understanding of modernism. In the fall of 1954 Stella entered Princeton University, receiving an A.B. He received his first concentrated art study under the guidance of the abstract painter Patrick Morgan. In recognition of his lively intelligence, his parents sent him to the nearby Andover preparatory school, Phillips Academy, which he attended from 1950 to 1954. Stella was one of three children of first-generation Sicilian Americans, Constance Aida (Santonelli) Stella, a homemaker with a background in art, and Frank Stella, a gynecologist. in Malden, Massachusetts), artist whose austere, geometric paintings and articulate statements about his aesthetics established him as a leader of the 1960s art scene.