BY KATHLEEN MAGRAMO AND SARA SMART
Frank Stella, the American artist renowned for his abstract works, died on Saturday at the age of 87, his longtime representative said in a statement.
Stella died at his home in Manhattan. His wife, Dr. Harriet E. McGurk, said the cause was lymphoma, according to The New York Times.
“It has been a great honor to work with Frank for this past decade,” said Marianne Boesky, who has represented Stella since 2014, in a statement. “His is a remarkable legacy, and he will be missed.”
Born in 1936, Massachusetts native Stella attended Phillips Academy Andover, where he studied painting under Patrick Morgan. He then studied history and painting at Princeton under Stephen Greene and Willliam Seitz, before moving to New York City in the late 1950s. Stella achieved early fame with his monochromatic “Black Paintings,” which were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art when he was just 22, and became his most famous contribution to the postwar abstract movement. Stella used house paint and a wide brush to create black stripes and left evenly spaced thin lines of exposed canvas between them.
He was prolific for six decades, evolving his medium with elements of mixed media and non-conventional geometric canvases to blur the boundary between painting and sculpture.
His acclaimed works include the “Protractor Series” of curved lines and bright colors, created in the late 1960s and early 70s, as well as the neon-speckled “Moby Dick”-inspired sculptures from the 80s and 90s.
Stella continued to create art well into his ninth decade, with his some of his recent sculptures being displayed at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in New York City. One of his final pieces is still on display in Florida at the Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville.
