to his mature periods. Finally, the paper will conclude with a critical assessment of his work, and the legacy that Stella's art contributes to the American artistic milieu.
Frank Stella was born in 1936 in a suburb of Boston, and retains only vague memories of his early artistic education. It was not until his later adolescence, and his work at the Phillips Academy, Andover, that Stella began to emerge as a serious artist in the vein of abstract composition. "In retrospect, Stella finds it interesting that many of his pictures at the time were organized in rectangles." Stella noted that he, ". . . liked organizing things in blocks, abstractly. I thought about that, and often said that I wanted to paint just squares or something comparable. It seemed to me the thing to do; a painting could just be involved with squares, and that would be enough."3
Stella was also at Andover with the art historian, and expert on Abstract Expressionism, Professor William Seitz. Seitz encouraged Stella, and with his help, Stella was converted to his own particular brand of Expressionism. In his own words, Stella notes that he,
was very taken with Abstract Expressionism, largely because of the obvious physical elements, particularly the size of the paintings and the wholeness of the gesture. I had always like house painting anyway, and the idea that they were using larger brushes. . . seemed to be a nice way of working . . . Painting in that way I was a facile as the next guy, if not more so. I could 'throw it around'; I wasn't inhibited about making a mess or losing control of a painting.4
An early example of this type of expression took place at the "Sixteen American" exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art between December 1959 and February 1960. It was here that Stella's art,
. . . made its first full scale manifesto, an uncompromising quartet of black paintings that seemed to turn inside out all the values, pictorial and...