Frank Stella

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Frank Stella is a key figure in postwar American modernism. Born in 1936 in a suburb of Boston, he attended the Phillips Academy where he was introduced to the work of Josef Albers and Hans Hoffman. In 1958, after graduating from Princeton with a degree in history, he moved to New York and worked as a house painter without intent to become an artist–his interest was solely in creation.

Shortly thereafter, while operating from a rented studio shared with artist Carl Andre, Stella was introduced to and later represented by dealer Leo Castelli. Inspired by the Abstract Expressionist movement, but in a departure from the period, he produced the Black Paintings series. His work emphasized a two-dimensional, flat application of monochromatic paint. At age 25, he exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and his work during this time gave way to the Minimalist movement that followed.

In the 1960s, Stella began to work in unique materials such as aluminum and copper paint and he moved away from the traditional square canvas. He experimented with the optical effect of arranging bold colors and geometric forms. Characteristic of the artist is his nonrepresentational painting, no allusion to a narrative or symbolism within the content of his work. In 1970, he became the youngest artist to receive a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Stella’s contributions to modern art are celebrated in the collections of major institutions such as Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. He lives and works in New York

Artists' rights - copied from Wikipedia

Stella had been an advocate of strong copyright protection for artists such as himself. On June 6, 2008, Stella (with Artists Rights Society president Theodore Feder; Stella is a member artist of the Artists Rights Society^[18]) published an Op-Ed for The Art Newspaper decrying a proposed U.S. Orphan Works law which "remove[s] the penalty for copyright infringement if the creator of a work, after a diligent search, cannot be located".

In the Op-Ed, Stella wrote,

The Copyright Office presumes that the infringers it would let off the hook would be those who had made a "good faith, reasonably diligent" search for the copyright holder. Unfortunately, it is totally up to the infringer to decide if he has made a good faith search. Bad faith can be shown only if a rights holder finds out about the infringement and then goes to federal court to determine whether the infringer has failed to conduct an adequate search. Few artists can afford the costs of federal litigation: attorneys’ fees in our country vastly exceed the licensing fee for a typical painting or drawing. The Copyright Office proposal would have a disproportionately negative, even catastrophic, impact on the ability of painters and illustrators to make a living from selling copies of their work... It is deeply troubling that government should be considering taking away their principal means of making ends meet—their copyrights.^[19]