| 1 | Name: | Mr. Frank Stella | |
| Year Elected: | 1999 | ||
| Class: | 5. The Arts, Professions, and Leaders in Public & Private Affairs | ||
| Subdivision: | 501. Creative Artists | ||
| Residency: | Resident | ||
| Living? : | Living | ||
| Birth Date: | 1936 | ||
One of the most significant abstract painters of the last fifty years, Frank Stella is an important figure in minimalism, post-painterly abstraction and offset lithography (a technique he devised). After studying history at Princeton University, he began work in 1958 on a series of strikingly sombre and intelligent paintings known as the black paintings. The Museum of Modern Art recognized the power of these paintings, which addressed themselves simultaneously to the empirical limitations of the flat space of paintings and the temporal extent of human life. Soon after this work was recognized with a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, his restrained style was unleashed in a series of paintings that broke open the pictorial surface, appearing now as large 3-dimensional planes of aluminum. Painted in bright colors, these paintings launched a novel investigation of pictorial space that was uniquely recognized by a second retrospective. In 1983, in recognition of Stella's interest in aesthetic theory, he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. In recent years he has taken on large-scale projects for public spaces and has received architectural commissions. He was presented with the John Singleton Copley Award in 2012 and the National Artists Award of the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in 2015. | |||