Frank Stella ’54 is the renowned artist he is today because of Phillips Academy. The access. The curriculum. The friendships (with fellow artists Carl Andre ’53 and Hollis Frampton ’54). Andover shaped the artist Stella would become. In this special episode of Every Quarter, hear the candid tales from his early years, stories of the New York art scene in the sixties and why he keeps coming back to where it all started.
Throughout his prolific and influential career, Stella has been a major figure in the art world, internationally hailed as one of America’s most significant artists. In his paintings, metal reliefs, sculptures, and prints, he has explored abstraction, which emerged during the early twentieth century in the innovations of artists such as Vassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Pablo Picasso. A pioneer of minimalism in the 1960s, Stella continues to experiment and innovate, creating some of the most daring work to be seen today.
Stella’s first major print retrospective since 1982, Frank Stella Prints at The Addison Gallery of American Art, includes more than 100 editioned prints drawn from the collection of Jordan Schnitzer and his Family Foundation, which demonstrate the artist’s remarkable career as a printmaker. Challenging traditional print media, Stella engaged in a series of stylistic reinventions from the geometric abstraction of minimalism in the early 1960s to the baroque exuberance of his later gestural work.
I just heard the podcast interview with Frank Stella. Why didn’t the interviewer ask him a question, as I had specifically requested in a telephone call before he arrived at P.A., as to whether his interest, if not obsession with, Melville’s Moby Dick as reflected in hundreds of his paintings and sculptures, had its origin while reading that remarkable novel as a student at Andover. Huge missed opportunity.
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