Frank Stella 1958

This tightly focused exhibition investigates a single moment in the career of one of the nation’s most important postwar artists. Nineteen fifty-eight was Frank Stella’s first year of independent work. After graduating from Princeton, he moved to New York City where he shared a studio with the young sculptor Carl Andre and threw himself into a series of monumental abstract canvases. Until now, these works have been either neglected or treated as a prelude to the proto-minimalist black paintings that Stella began at the end of the year. But the works from 1958 stand solidly on their own, as the exhibition demonstrates by bringing most of them together for the first time.

The accompanying catalogue, with essays by the curators, illustrates all of Stella’s known work from 1958, and a symposium on April 8 will assemble scholars and curators to consider the larger significance of the exhibited works.

Organized by Harry Cooper, curator of modern art, Fogg Museum; and Megan R. Luke, Ph.D. candidate, History of Art and Architecture, Harvard University.

Frank Stella 1958 has been funded in part through the generosity of John and Frances Bowes, Lief D. Rosenblatt, the NBT Charitable Trust, Manson Benedict, the National Endowment for the Arts, Agnes Gund and Daniel Shapiro, The Broad Art Foundation, Jessie Lie Farber, David Mirvish, and A. Bernard Ackerman.