The American painter Frank Stella, recognized for his monochromatic and minimalist paintings from the beginning of his career, died this Saturday at his residence in New York at the age of 87. According to his wife, Harriet McGurk, his cause of death was lymphoma.
Stella achieved early recognition, almost as soon as she completed her studies at Princeton University, thanks to her ‘Black Paintings’ series, large-scale paintings consisting of dark stripes barely separated by lines of unpainted canvas, and which contrasted with expressionism. dominant abstract in the 1950s.
As The Washington Post recalls, four of these works were included in the 1959 exhibition ‘Sixteen Americans’ at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, a group show in which Stella was the youngest artist.
After this proposal, however, the painter changed his register and during the following years he created colorful works, some of them still with stripes, others with geometric figures.
Towards the end of the 1960s he embarked on the ambitious ‘Protractor’ project, a series of large paintings composed of overlapping semicircles of bright colours.
Little given to explaining his works, in the following decades his work extended to sculpture and even design, with commissions from public and private entities, such as the one he did for the Los Angeles Gas Company Tower, in California.
Son of Frank and Constance Stella, he a gynecologist and she a landscape painter, Frank Philip Stella was born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, Massachusetts.
After completing his history degree at Princeton, he got a studio in Manhattan, where, while painting houses, he began working on his dark-toned paintings.
In 1961 he married Barbara Rose, who would become a renowned art critic and whom he divorced in 1969 (she died in 2020, according to The New York Times).
With her he had two children, Rachel and Michael, and with his next wife, McGurk, a pediatrician whom he married in 1978, he had two more, Patrick and Peter.
In addition to five grandchildren, he is also survived by Laura, a daughter he had from his relationship with Shirley De Lemos Wyse, with whom he was in the period between his two marriages.
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