Frank Stella /

Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism and post-painterly abstraction. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried; his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artistic development. Stella moved to New York in 1958 after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters who still works today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career. Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett Newman's work and the "target" paintings of Jasper Johns. He began to produce works which emphasized the picture-as-object, rather than the picture as a representation of something, be it something in the physical