Stella,
Frank (1936- ), American painter, born in Malden, Massachusetts, whose work
is considered to have influenced the development of minimal art. He began
painting as an undergraduate at Princeton University, where he completed
a bachelor of arts degree in 1958. His earliest works reveal the influence
of the geometric, gridlike art of Piet Mondrian, as well as the loose, thick
style of abstract expressionism. After 1958 Stella rejected the subjectivity
of expressionism in favor of an impersonal objectivity that treats the painting
as an entity in its own right—a painted surface—rather than as
a representation of an object or an embodiment of a state of mind. Stella's
first exhibited works in this mode were the so-called pinstripe, or black
paintings: wide black stripes separated by narrow strips of bare canvas.
It was this style that paved the way for minimalism. Later, in the 1960s,
he experimented with bright colors and oddly shaped canvases.Stella has produced several series of paintings, each exploring a particular theme. The best known of these are a series of bands of bright color that create illusions of depth similar to those produced by the bellows of a camera (1962); striped shaped canvases, trapezoids, "L"s, and "T"s (1960-1963); dual zigzags and pinwheels (1964-1965); and a so-called protractor series of large geometric circles and half circles (1967-1968). In the late 1970s Stella began to evolve a style that combines a return to expressionism with three-dimensional elaborations of the painted surface.