#Frank stella series#

The significance of the current exhibition, says Rosenblum, who is a New York University professor and the curator of 20th-century art at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, is that it uncovers a body of early work that had either been dismissed as “mere juvenilia” or ignored altogether in the excitement over Stella’s audacious minimalism. “He was able to reconcile two very different models of painting”: the formal, geometric shapes that had come out of abstract expressionism, and the more minimalist work of artists such as Jasper Johns - much of whose work, in its flat presentation and familiar subject matter, called into question the line between art and object.

“Stella was a person who was very much in the right place at the right time,” says Hal Foster, the Townsend Martin ’17 Professor of Art and Archaeology at Princeton. By the end of 1959, when he was only 23 years old, Stella had earned representation by the prestigious Leo Castelli Gallery and had a show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The exhibit covers paintings and sculptures, many never before shown publicly, that Stella made during that year and that, in a way, made him. Sackler Museum and the Merrill Collection in Houston. 31, following appearances at Harvard’s Arthur M. Stella’s work from his last months at Princeton and first months as a young artist living in New York City is the subject of an exhibition titled “1958,” which will be at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, through Dec.

#Frank stella series#

Within 18 months of his graduation from Princeton, at a time in life when most of his classmates were sitting dully in law school classes or fumbling through their first jobs, Frank Stella ’58 was one of the most important artists in the world, a comet who exploded abstract expressionism in a series of black, almost brutally minimalist paintings that seemed, in the words of art historian Robert Rosenblum, to “close the door on what art could do.” “That’s all he’s ever wanted to be,” Carnicelli replied. “Does he want to be an artist?” Fried asked. “Oh, that’s Frank Stella,” Carnicelli answered. “Who’s that guy on the couch, drawing?” he asked Thomas Carnicelli ’58. His attention was drawn to a short, wiry young man sitting on a sofa, intently doodling with a marker on a pad of paper, producing, as Fried later recalled it, “these incredible abstract drawings.” One evening in the fall of 1955, Michael Fried ’59 – then a Princeton freshman, now a noted art critic - attended an editorial meeting of the Nassau Literary Magazine in the basement of Whig Hall. An exhibition centers on the paintings the artist created in his senior year at Princeton and in the months following graduation