Frank Stella doing what he does best: being himself

At 80, Frank Stella shows more enthusiasm than four 20-year-olds. He constantly pushes the art he tries to pursue. His career has not been a few years of wonder. Rather, it is a six decade long period of pure marvel. He has done brightly colored geometric shapes, sculptures, three-dimensional reliefs, and mostly black paintings.

Stella’s work has reformed the way people treat and interpret art. He reformed the world of art in the 1950s. His stunning range of work is on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art and is curated in partnership with the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. Also, due to the size of work Stella prefers, his studio is more like a museum. There are a hundred artworks and tables strewn around.

Uniqueness is Frank Stella’s USP

The Director of Whitney Museum of American Art and co-curator, Adam Weinberg, is all praises for Stella. He admires the man and holds his art in high regard. “The integrity of being an artist for Frank means going into the unknown. A great artist is somebody who’s not scared to reinvent themselves and to start all over again. And some artists do it once, twice, three times in their career. He’s done it probably a dozen times or more,” says Weinberg.

Frank Stella says that he has been a painter ever since he was a kid, be it painting his house with his dad or painting clamshells with his mom. Stella has always said that he is more of a house painter. He took his art seriously when he reached high school, and he has been ambitious ever since. His words have constantly expressed his love for abstract painting. Frank Stella says, “I had to find a way to paint abstractly, which is what I wanted to do. And, you know, I couldn’t forget Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, I mean that was the basis. You know, and you couldn’t forget Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Joan Miro either. And it had to be, you know, at least as good or better.”

Frank Stella talks about his dreams and aspirations

Though Stella admired a lot of artists, he never wanted to be one of them. And he achieved his dream with special black paintings in 1958. Adam Weinberg explained, “It’s basically one color of paint. You have bits of canvas that are unpainted and you have these thick stretcher bars. So you see that a painting is an object; that it’s not a window into something — you’re not looking at a landscape, you’re not looking at a portrait, but you’re looking at a painting. It’s basically: A painting is a painting is a painting. And it’s what he said famously: What you see is what you see.” Stella further added, “It still looked like a mess but it was, as a lot of people say, an interesting mess, because the stripes were then all black so it wasn’t a two-color painting anymore. It was a kind of one-color painting. But the idea was there.”

However, these paintings did make art critics furious. “There’s a lot of difference between being well known and being notorious, and the black paintings didn’t make me well known — they made me notorious,” says Stella.