A Few Lucky Breaks

From his first "small idea," world-renowned abstract impressionist
Frank Stella '54 seemed destined for success.

by Theresa Fucci Pease
The city of Malden, Mass., was incorporated in the mid-17th century. Its boom time came in the early 1900s, when immigrants streamed in from Canada and Europe to work in the Converse Rubber Company, around which clustered a neighborhood of sturdy Victorian cottages and multi- family dwellings named Edgeworth. Among the Italian workers who lived within a whistle-blow of Elisha Converse's factory was a couple named Stella who had a son and a grandson each called Frank. The older Frank, a precocious scholar, had an accelerated education that made him a practicing doctor by 21. It was a lucky break for the history of contemporary ar t that the younger Frank was a bit of a brat.
Frank Jr. had made it through elementary school OK, but at Beebe Junior High, he kept getting into adolescent scrapesóplaying hooky, messing around in school, and shoplifting petty items.
"My parents decided to do what one does wi th a problem, which is send it away," Stella recalls with a smile. For them, "sending it away" mean t shipping Frank off to the safer confines of boarding school. A pair of Phillips Academy wrestling coaches with whom the two Franks often worked out in a gym at Boston's Young Men's Christian Union suggested he apply to Andover.
That was another lucky break, because while the scrappy city kid thrived on the Phillips Academy wrestling team, he soon felt just as at home in art class, where he found himself at the epicenter of a contemporary art movement. Among his teacher-mentors were exhibiting artists of no less stature than the famed Morgans, Patrick and Maud. On the faculty was a handful of artists who'd earned their stri pes working with Black Mountain School guru Josef Albers at Yale, and in the academy 's Addison Gallery, attention was being paid to abstract expressionists like Hans Hofmann, whose first solo exhibition anywhere had taken place at Andover not long before.
"Hans Hofmann was the apostle of modernism, and he was really well-understood at Andover. Something was going on there, and somehow I really got it," says Stella.
Among PA art students, was Stella stellar?
"I got sort of mixed reviews from the art faculty, but I liked it, so I just kept doing it," says the artist, who adds that he and other students were required to produce one representational picture--a still life--to prove they could. After that they were on their own.
Did the young Stella know he was a nascent luminary?
"I was too busy making art to spend time thinking about being an artist," he says. "I painted a lot like my teacher, Patrick Morgan. I was a little bit more focused than the other art students and a little bit more serious. They were more grandiose; they had bigger ideas. I had very small ideas."
One of Stella's small ideas was to continue making art as an under- graduate at Princeton while he studied history. After that, he planned to spend a few months painting in Manhattan, then enter the Army and go on to graduate school, possibly in law. He had no aspirations toward celebrity. But lucky break number three occurred in the form of a 4F ranking, or medical disqualification, by the Selective Service Board in Boston.
"The Army didn't want me. I was stranded," says Stella, "so I went back to New York to paint and do odd jobs painting apartments." "The paintings I was working on in my studio were sort of striped, but basically all black. I really liked them, so after producing about seven, I started calling my family and friends in to see them," he says.
His father was alarmed. "Black won't sell," he reportedly told his namesake--but Stella's friends called their friends and their friends- of-friends, one of whom turned out to be famed art dealer Leo Castelli. After a couple of visits and consultation with a curator from the Museum of Modern Art, Castelli offered to mount a gallery exhibition of Stella's work. Audaciously, the unknown painter asked for a guaranteed minimum of $75 a week. The dealer agreed to the $300-a-month contract, and Stella said goodbye to house painting. Not yet 24 years old, he was a self- supporting artist.
"It didn't feel like a pivotal point in my life. The pivotal point was making the paintings. The rest of it just took care of itself," he says.
"The rest of it" was a life of fame. The doctor was wrong: Black sold. Critics raved. Stella was married, young, to a well-known arts writer from whom he was divorced in 1970. Their friends were artists. There was probably not a known artist of the 1960s with whom the couple was not acquai nted, he says in a tone of surprise, as if he had just realized it. By 34, Stella was the subject of the first of two retrospec- tives at MoMA.
Nearly three decades later, he remains one of the world's most acclaimed living artists, his works displayed in leading museums. He no longer paints all in black, but uses color--lots of color. His ideas got larger. According to arts writer John Villani, one reason for Stella's longevi ty as a superstar is that he "has shown little hesitation about throwing himself headlong into pursuits that expand the boundaries of contemporary art. . . . It's as if he has earned the right to embrace constant change and continually challenges the art world to keep up with him."
"Up until 35," Stella confesses, "I had a slightly skewed world view. I honestly believed everybody in the world wanted to make abstract paintings, and people only became lawyers and doctors and brokers and things because they couldn't make abstract paintings."
Was there a morning when he woke up and said, "Oh, my God, I'm Frank Stella?"
" I was always a little bit too hectic and a little bit too tense to focus on myself. Sometimes it was a little too much to handle," shrugs Stella, who is now in his second, more successful, marriage to a woman named Harriet, and who is the father of five children, including Rachel Stella '80.
Hectic is still a word that applies to Stella's life--at 62, he finds it harder than before to leave his Greenwich Village home and fly around for an exhibition opening here, a lecture there--but, spending three days at Andover in October as an Elson Artist-in-Residence, he appeared neither tense nor self-focused. His eminence sat easily on him. As he accepted praise from opening nighters at his printmaking exhibition in the Addison, as he discussed his career with powerful art critics and curious TV interviewers, as he bowed his head to thunderous applause after a lecture in Kemper Auditorium, as he shepherded groups of students through the Addison and spray-painted an old Dodge Dynasty with them, he seemed more of Edgeworth than of SoHo. "I believe in living my life straight up," says Stella, who belies jet-set art-world stereotypes by dressing in mismatched flannels, tweeds and as often as not New York Rangers sweatshirts, drinking Sam Adams from a bottle, and fingering the fragrant cigar that often juts from his mouth. He admits that, beyond following the Rangers and playing with his younger kids, he has few interests outside the studio.
What might Stella have done with his life had he not given it to art?
Again he smiles. "I'm not sure I would have been very good at any thing else," he muses, "but I don't like to say I have given my life to art. I prefer to say art has given me my life."