Frank Stella is an American painter who remains poplar after almost four decades of work. He was born in 1936 and studied at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts under Patrick Morgan and at Princeton University under William Seitz and Stephen Greene. After 1958 he lived in New York. He came to the fore in the 1960s as one of the most inventive of the new school of Post-Painterly Abstraction, a reaction against Abstract Expressionism. He was then exhibited widely in New York, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. A retrospective exhibition in 1970 was held under the auspices of the International Council of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He began as one of many post war minimalist painters, but then his work took a different route from the others, leading him to a "second career" in abstract expressionism. In this career, he struggled with issues, which had placed abstract art in a standstill after Mondrian, and Stella looked back to the sixteenth century for solutions. Stella has also been influenced by the Baroque period, first because of parallel situations, but also because of similarities in the creation of space ("Concepts in career: Frank Stella").
The point of departure for Stella in 1958 for his new approach to abstraction was the flag paintings of Jasper Johns. Using various devices, Stella emphasized the flatness of the painting pattern, abolishing the three-dimensional image, and he was uncompromising as he refused to permit the introduction of deep recession behind the picture plane. The result was that the figure-ground relationship was almost completely eliminated as the stripes and orthogonals constituting the picture echoed the contours of the format. To achieve this more effectively, he would use notched canvases or shaped canvases. His style came to be known as "non-relational" painting in which he made the forms coextensive with the painting as a whole and eliminated discrete contained shapes ...