It's always a pleasure to teach about an artist that is still living. Just breaks up all the rest.
Here is the link to the Grade 3-5 Lesson Plan. Download frank-stella001.pdf (1653.4K)
Late 1950s and early 1960s
Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical world, or something in the artist's emotional world. Stella married Barbara Rose, later a well-known art critic, in 1961. Around this time he said that a picture was "a flat surface with paint on it - nothing more".
Morro Castle 1958 Enamel on Canvas, 84 5/8 x 107 7/8
Delaware Crossing 1961, Oil on Canvas 77 x 77"
Effingham I, Ireegular Polygon series, 1967, Fluorescent alkyd and epoxy on canvas, 10' 8" x 11'
Bonne Bay, from Newfoundland Series (Axsom 55) m 1971, Color Litho, Silk Screen 38 x 70"
This was a departure from the technique of creating a painting by first making a sketch. Many of the works are created by simply using the path of the brush stroke, very often using common house paint.
Price Realized - $15,000
lithograph and screenprint in colors, 1971, on Special Arjomari, signed and dated in pencil, numbered 37/58 (there were also 12 artist's proofs), with the Gemini G.E.L. blindstamps, Los Angeles, with full margins, apparently in very good condition, not examined out of the frame
La Vecchia Dell'Orto
1986. Mixed media on etched magnesium, aluminum, canvas, and fiberglass, 163 3/4 x 190 1/4 x 32 1/2". 1990.002
Frank Stella is best known for his shaped canvases of the 1960s, which were painted in brightly colored stripes. In the late 1970s, he turned to a bolder, more dynamic expression, creating painted and constructed reliefs such as this one. This piece is number twenty in the Cones and Pillars series. The titles of works in this series are taken from Italian folktales, and they represent Stella’s desire to reintroduce narrative drama into abstract painting. Here, to his stripes and colors of the 1960s, Stella has added a third dimension and a sense of tumultuous motion.
Takht-1-Sulayman I, 1967, Polymer and Fluorescentpaint on canvas. 10' x 20'
In 1967 Frank Stella began a series of brightly colored paintings based on the protractor, a drafting tool used for measuring and constructing angles. With the protractor he made three semicircular designs--the "interlace," the "rainbow" (seen here), and the "fan"--which he calls variations I, II, and III. He used these designs as the basis for the many paintings in the Protractor series.Stella named the paintings after circular cities and archaeological sites in the Middle East, where he had traveled in 1963. Tahkt-i-Sulayman is an ancient shrine in Azerbaijan, Iran. But Stella insists that the meaning of his work is purely formal: "My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen there is there. It really is an object.... You can see the whole idea without any confusion. What you see is what you see."
