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Frank Stella, to the envy of many, is that rarest of artists: one who has known little of failure. His initial, post-collegiate efforts—the “Black Paintings”—met with almost immediate commercial success and critical acclaim. And since this auspicious start, his stature and influence have only increased over his nearly 50-year career. No serious museum of contemporary art can be without a Stella in its collection, and his works routinely fetch seven figures at auction.
While Stella (b. 1936; Malden, Mass.) is best known as a painter of flat (and, famously, shaped) canvases, he began introducing relief into his work as early as the 1970’s—and by the 1990’s, sculpture became, and remains, a major part of his output. And as Stella himself puts it, “It’s hard not to think about architecture when you’ve gone from painting to relief to sculpture.”
Indeed, architecture has been a serious focus of his now for nearly 20 years—and his achievements in this area, at least in the eyes of curators at the world’s most prestigious museum, merited a solo exhibition: “Frank Stella: Painting into Architecture,” which recently ran at New York’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art for three months. (A companion show, “Frank Stella on the Roof,” is on view through Oct. 28, 2007.)