Though Frank Stella never attended a class with Hofmann (he arrived in New York the same year the artist retired from teaching), he considers himself to be “a Hofmann student without knowing he was one.” Greatly inspired by the often-overlooked master, Stella penned an essay for American Heritage magazine, entitled “The Artist of Century,” in which he likened the effect of Hofmann's manipulation of pigment to the “force of a bomb,” thus proving that Hofmann’s influence extends well beyond the classroom.

Stella’s charmed career in the arts began in 1958 when, fresh out of Princeton University, he came to New York and created a studio out of a former jeweler's shop in the Lower East Side. He began using common house paint to create symmetrical black stripes on canvas. These early works, known as the “Black Paintings,” were chosen by The Museum of Modern Art in the fall of 1959 to be included in their show entitled Sixteen Americans. Their debut is credited with the launch of the minimalist movement of the 1960s. The original asking price for a Black Painting was $75. Today, forty-four years later, the seminal works sell for over $5 million dollars.

Born in 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts to an affluent family, Stella first began painting while in prep school at Phillips Academy in Andover. His father, a gynecologist, encouraged him to go to a top Ivy League school, and when the time came for Stella to decide, he chose Princeton for its proximity to the New York art scene. Once in Manhattan, Stella quickly became a regular in that scene. He befriended painters Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and architects Richard Meier and Philip Johnson, and married his first wife, art critic Barbara Rose, then a Columbia graduate student.

In 1959, art dealer Leo Castelli included Stella, then only 23, among the breakthrough artists his gallery represented. Though he continued to refine his signature cool, removed approach into the 60s, his paintings evolved to include bright colors, metallic paint and geometrically and curvilinear-shaped canvases.

In contrast to their minimalist appearance, the titles of Stella’s works became increasingly exotic and evocative: names like “Tahkt-I-Sulayman Variation II,” (1969) “Firuzabad III,” (1970), and “Botafogo,” (1975) suggest multiple levels of depth and meaning.

Stella became the one of the few artists to be featured in two major retrospectives at The Museum of Modern Art: one in 1970 and one in 1987. Throughout the 70s and 80s, he continued to reinvent himself, making a wild departure from his Minimalist roots to explore sculptural forms using explosive colors.

Of late, Stella’s work has remained within the three-dimensional realm; his latest sculptures (which he refers to as paintings, saying, ''A sculpture is just a painting cut out and stood up somewhere.’’) abandon the brazen color, but still maintain an explosive quality in their scale and form. In the summer of 2001,The Prince of Homburg, a massive 20,000-pound outdoor sculpture, mostly metal, was inaugurated at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.





View a list of selected exhibitions of Frank Stella's work