HARD-EDGE: Osvaldo Mariscotti, Josef Albers, Willard Boepple, Frank Stella, Ellsworth Kelly

Frank Stella (1936-2024) was a pivotal figure in postwar American art and a central catalyst for the emergence of Minimalism. Rising to prominence in the late 1950s with his Black Paintings, he challenged the gestural, emotionally charged language of Abstract Expressionism and advanced a radically different idea of what painting could be. Stella insisted that a painting should be understood as an object in its own right, not as a vehicle for narrative or symbolism, summarizing his position in the now canonical statement: “What you see is what you see.”

In the Black Paintings, Stella used commercial enamel and a house painter’s brush to apply evenly spaced black stripes on raw canvas, leaving thin bands of unpainted canvas between them, a deliberate reduction of means that stripped away illusion, gesture, and external reference and helped define the visual language of Minimal art. Four of these works appeared in the Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Sixteen Americans in 1959, a pivotal moment for both his career and the broader move beyond Abstract Expressionism. Stella’s practice continued to expand in ambition, from the shaped canvases of the 1960s, including the Protractor series, to the complex reliefs and large-scale constructions of later decades that merged painting, sculpture, and engineered form. By the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the series inspired by Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, he developed spatially intricate works that often began as small studio collages or models and were later enlarged through digital modeling and industrial fabrication, reflecting his ongoing interest in new materials and technologies within a fundamentally exploratory studio process.

Central to Stella’s philosophy was a distrust of over-interpretation and a commitment to visual clarity. He consistently resisted symbolic readings of his work, arguing that its meaning resided in what was physically present to the eye. At the same time, his thinking about abstraction was deeply informed by art history and theory. In the mid 1980s he delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, later published as Working Space, in which he argued for a renewed ambition in abstract painting and engaged closely with the spatial complexities of baroque art. This dual position, both anti-illusionistic and historically aware, has made Stella an essential reference point for artists and thinkers working in the wake of modernism.

Born in Malden, Massachusetts, Stella studied at Phillips Academy, Andover, and at Princeton University, where he took art history and painting courses before moving to New York. There he supported himself by painting houses while developing the work that would transform his field. Over the course of his career he received numerous honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 2009, and his work has been the subject of major retrospectives at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His works are held in many significant public collections, among them the Menil Collection, Houston; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Toledo Museum of Art; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Ellsworth Kelly (1923–2015) is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the postwar period and a defining figure in American abstraction. Over seven decades, he shaped the development of Minimalism, Color Field painting, hard-edge abstraction, and aspects of Pop Art through his commitment to clarity of form, saturated color, and the suppression of expressive gesture. Guided by an intense observational practice, Kelly believed that form already existed in the world and that the artist’s role was to isolate and reveal it. This philosophy became central to his mature vocabulary and positioned him as a key voice in the evolution of abstraction after World War II.

Kelly’s artistic direction was profoundly shaped by his years in postwar France from 1948 to 1954, where influences ranging from Romanesque architecture to the work of Matisse, Arp, and Brancusi encouraged him to break from gestural American painting. During this period he developed shaped canvases, modular compositions, and sharply defined fields of color. His early landmark work Colors for a Large Wall (1951) demonstrated his interest in seriality, geometric division, and the visual impact of pure color.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s Kelly refined a language of crisp contours and radiantly flat color derived from close attention to the built and natural environment. Architectural fragments, shadows, and plant forms became sources for paintings and sculptures that emphasize spatial clarity and visual balance. Alongside these works, he maintained an extensive drawing practice. His contour drawings of figures, plants, and flowers reveal a delicate sensitivity to line and underscore the observational foundation of his more reductive abstractions.

Born in Newburgh, New York, Kelly studied at the Pratt Institute, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris on the G.I. Bill. After returning to the United States, he continued to expand his formal vocabulary across painting, sculpture, drawing, and printmaking. His work is represented in major public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Tate, London; and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Kelly received numerous honors, including the National Medal of Arts in 2013.

Across his career, Kelly established a vision of abstraction grounded in perception, precision, and the conviction that simplicity can generate profound visual and spatial experience. His influence continues to shape artistic approaches to form and color in contemporary practice.