Frank Stella 19701987 Author:William Rubin Frank Stella is regarded as one of the most important living American artists to have succeeded the Abstract Expressionists of the 1950s. In his early years he established himself as a painter of powerful minimalist canvases, using simple geometric patterns as images. But in the early 1970s, he began what might be called the "maximalist," o... more »r inclusive, phase of his art. This work posed new kinds of questions: how much could he subsume from the plastic arts of sculpture and architecture and still be making paintings? And how many of the lapsed conventions of painting itself--in the realms of configuration, spatial structure, and even narrative form--could be redeployed in an art that still remained wholly abstract?« less