Frank Stella pictured in his home in Manhattan.
American artist Frank Stella rose to prominence in the mid-1950s, and he quickly established a reputation as an important and innovative artist. He grew to become a towering figure of the contemporary art world, endlessly experimenting with new techniques and styles until his death in May 2024.
Stella’s influence can still be keenly felt, however, and his work continues to command high prices. He was an especially prolific printmaker, and the majority of his prints (which now account for over 80% of his work sold at auction) sell for between £1,000 and £5,000, with many fetching far higher prices.
Though Stella tended to reject the idea of conveying emotional meaning through art, it is still interesting to know some facts about his life when considering his work. Therefore, below are five things you might not have known about Frank Stella.
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He Helped His Father Paint Houses
Frank Stella’s father was a gynaecologist who paid his way through medical school by painting and decorating houses, and the young Stella helped him. So, although he never went to art school, Stella did in fact have a deeply-ingrained relationship with painting since childhood. He later recalled that “my father would make me sand the floor; we had to do the sanding and scraping before you could hold the brush and then paint on the wall. So it was that kind of apprenticeship and familiarity.” Little did anyone know at the time that Stella would go on to become one of the most important artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
His Most Expensive Print Sold For Over £233,000
The Fountain is a gargantuan print from 1992 which measures 7 x 23 feet, and which was created using seven different printing techniques (woodcut, aquatint, etching, collage, relief, drypoint, and airbrush). The print was the grand culmination of Stella’s Moby Dick series based on Herman Melville’s classic 1851 novel of the same name, and its title refers to chapter 85 of the book, when the enormous whale blows a spray of rainbowlike spume out of its blowhole. The Fountain print is an extraordinary combination of vibrant colours and dynamic shapes, and it was sold by Christie’s in October 2019 for £233,039.
The Fountain sold by Christie’s in 2019
He Reshaped Printmaking
Frank Stella was initially fairly disparaging about printmaking, preferring to focus on painting. In the mid-1960s, however, Ken Tyler (the master printmaker who worked with David Hockney to produce some of his most sought-after work) invited Stella to experiment with printing in his workshop.
It was a seminal moment which marked the beginning of a long and productive working relationship that changed the face of printmaking forever. With Tyler’s help, Stella pushed the boundaries of printmaking and endlessly experimented with techniques; he is even credited with inventing offset lithography, which results in the final print being the same way around as the original design, rather than being a mirror image. Indeed, Stella’s offset lithographs are very popular in today’s market, with Stapling Down and Cutting Up #2, for instance, being sold for £111,189 by Phillips in May 2018.
He Loved Car Racing
Frank Stella had a passion for car racing and race tracks, and he is even known for having painted a BMW 3.0 CSL in his own distinctive style (he also went to watch a number of races in which the car took part). In 1982, the artist was caught driving his silver Ferrari at almost double the 55-mile-per-hour speed limit in Taconic State Parkway; rather than receiving jail time or a fine, he gave a series of public lectures on his paintings.
Stella’s love of car racing also translated to his prints; his Circuits series made between 1982 and 1984 is made up of 16 prints based on different famous racetracks around the globe, such as Estoril, Talladega, and Imola. These prints are amongst his most sought-after at auction, and the ones based on the Pergusa racetrack are especially popular; Pergusa Three was sold by Sotheby’s in March 2022 for £64,990.
Frank Stell’s BMW 3.0 CSL
He Brought Literature And Poetry Into His Work
In 1983, Frank Stella was appointed Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry at Harvard, the first abstract painter and the youngest person at the time to ever hold the post. Harvard says that in this instance, “the term ‘poetry’ is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts”, and Stella’s appointment to the post reflected his increasing use of literature and poetry as a source of inspiration in his work.
Between 1982 and 1984, for instance, Stella created a series of prints called Illustrations after El Lissitzky’s Had Gaya, centring around the lyrics of ‘Had Gaya’ (a traditional Jewish Passover song) and a previous series of gouaches by Russian artist El Lissitzky which were also based on the song. Stella’s most famous literature-inspired print may well be The Fountain, the enormous culmination of his Moby Dick series based on Herman Melville’s canonical 1851 novel of the same name, and the artist’s most expensive print ever sold at auction.
