Frank Stella

The American Frank Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts. He began to work intensively with painting during his high school years. From 1954 to 1958 he studied history at Princeton University in New Jersey. Here he also attended painting courses with William C. Seitz and Stephen Greene, both of whom gave Frank Stella important ideas for dealing with contemporary art, and he visited numerous exhibitions in New York galleries and museums. After graduation, Frank Stella moved to New York and began to seriously pursue a life as a painter. Frank Stella gains attention with the series of "Black Paintings" created during this early period. As early as 1959, at only 23 years old, he is among the "Sixteen Americans" presented to the public by Dorothy Canning Miller, curator of the Museum of Modern Art, for her fifth survey show of American art of the period. He is also signed by the renowned gallery owner Leo Castelli as early as 1959. At the beginning of the 1960s, the series of "Aluminum Paintings" and "Copper Paintings" followed. With them, Frank Stella became one of the key figures in the transition from abstract expressionism to minimal art. With the sentence "What you see is what you see" Frank Stella created the unofficial credo of Minimal Art. From 1961 to 1969 Frank Stella was married to the art historian and critic Barbara Rose, who vehemently supported the emerging Minimal Art.